AirPort With A PowerBook 2400c

The Lucent WaveLAN 11 mbps Turbo Silver PCMCIA (PC) card for my 2400c arrived today. I ordered it Friday for $165.60 from CC&TS in Harrisburg, VA (Dan Early, 540-564-0052). CDW has them backordered for $160 if you want to wait until the end of the month or more. The bottom line is that the WaveLAN works great in either the top or bottom PC card slot! My 2400c is now wirelessly networked with the Base Station and Power Mac G4 and iBook with AirPort cards and the remainder of my wired network.

The WaveLAN PC card comes with a brief manual, mostly of specifications, but also a 16-page chapter on how to set it up on Windows. There's no dedicated Mac chapter as, of course, none is needed. It also comes with a CD that has drivers for the Mac OS, Windows (all flavors) and Linux. I checked the web site and there are newer Mac drivers out so I downloaded the package. I turned off encryption on the Base Station, copied the AirPort Utility application from the G4 to the 2400c, installed the WaveLAN drivers, shut down, kicked out the Macsense ethernet card, inserted the WaveLAN card, booted up, set TCP/IP to "WaveLAN/IEEE" and "Using DHCP Server" and set AppleTalk to "WaveLAN/IEEE"--that's it. File Sharing from the Chooser and imternet service both work perfectly. The WaveLAN card has 2 LEDs that flash to confirm it's working. Moving about, the 2400c stayed connected even in the far reaches of our basement and everywhere in the yard outside.

Which PowerBooks will the WaveLAN work with? The ReadMe file mentions the 190, 5300, 2400, 3400, G3 and G3 Series and Mac OS versions as early as 7.5.2. I don't know if any other PowerBooks are compatible, however.

I am writing today's edition of Macs Only!, answering email and surfing for news from my armchair while watching Monday Night Football. This is so unbelievably cool! The only concern is that I had to disable encryption. Hey, is somebody next door poaching my bandwidth? Well, hopefully soon Lucent will enable Apple's encrytion scheme.