[Soekris] Soekris 4521 PCMCIA Card Recommendations

[Wim Vandeputte]

Dear David,

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 07:01:15PM -0400, David Post wrote:
> What are your recommendations for PCMCIA hardware that would serve in an 
> AP capacity? I am told I should look into Prism based cards... EnGenius 
> has come up.
> What are your experiences with robustness and manufacturer product 
> support? If you have had experience with PCMCIA vs. miniPCI which would 
> you recommend?

Basicly, for 11b, "nobody gets fired for buying Prism 2.5"

Cards like the EnGenius ones (or for that matter the Senao produced ones) 
look like:

For MiniPCI:

wi0 at pci0 dev 16 function 0 "Intersil PRISM2.5 Mini-PCI WLAN" rev 0x01: irq 11
wi0: PRISM2.5 ISL3874A(Mini-PCI), Firmware 1.1.0 (primary), 1.4.9 (station), address 00:02:6f:33:ac:61

For PCMCIA:

wi1 at pcmcia0 function 0 "INTERSIL, HFA384x/IEEE, Version 01.02" port 0xa000/64
wi1: PRISM2.5 ISL3873, Firmware 1.1.0 (primary), 1.4.9 (station), address 00:02:6f:08:0b:22

All unix distributions have good support for them, some people prefer to upgrade
the above primary and station firmware to compensate for some bugs, see:

http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/

As for miniPCI versus PCMCIA, there are various reasons to pick one, for example
the choice between Soekris 4526 and 4511 to start with. The pigtails (UFL versus
MMCX) are different and availability varies. The performance specs differ
too (100 mW versions, 200 mW versions, some people claim 160 mW for the MiniPCI
versions, Senao told me 200 mW, who to believe? :-)

Wim.