Cæptain's Log

Posts Tagged ‘XSPAN’

If you’re looking to get some serious wireless performance out of your netbook (this tut is for the Aspire One D150, but the general principle is the same for all of them) then you might consider adding an external RP-SMA jack + antenna to it.  A subtle addition is adding 802.11 N support.  Read my previous posts on the topic for more on that.  I positioned the antenna mount in place of the Kensington Lock, so if you can’t afford to sac your KLock then you may want to look for an alternate location (I found this to be the best location, imo).

This is a very simple mod to do; you need:

• Standard philips screwdriver
• Thin, flat yet stiff tool (xacto knife, razor blade, thin jewlers screwdriver, etc) to pop the keyboard (very tight)
• Dremel Tool, small drill or similar device for tooling plastic
• U.FL pigtail to RP-SMA Male cable; mine was 12″ but I think 6″ should do; you want a nut / lock washers too
  • Optional: RP-SMA Male – Female Right angle adapter for a better antenna placement across the back
• RP-SMA antenna – whatever works for you
  • Optional: 802.11N Mini-Pci card – refer to previous posts on topic

Start by gutting the netbook and unscrewing everything you see.

Use your flat tool to pop off the keyboard.  There is one spring-loaded tab above the F8 key that needs to be depressed; the remaining tabs are on the sides and are part of the bezel.  This is challenging if you are unfamiliar with the process – be gentile but don’t be afraid to use some force to pop the keyboard out.  You may want to use more than one tool to assist in getting under the keyboard to pop it off.  Disconnect all the ribbon cables you see and unscrew the bezel.  Pop her off.

Here is an exposure of the right side – the yellow tape is the backside of the PCI slot; that is where your cable needs to end.  Notice the black and white cable running from said location up to the right joint – right next to the KLock.  These are the existing antenna wires.  Leave them alone – no reason to remove them.

Locate the Kensington Lock here.  It’s attached to the case with 2 plastic mushroom plugs.  These are not intended to be removed, so you will need to tool them off.  They go without much of a fight or mess.

Note the bit I used on my Dremel Tool – very nice for this application (it’s a drum cutting bit of sorts).

Next you need to tool a larger hole in the side of the case for the SMA mount.  Take your time and be gentile – I emphasized on the right (short) side of the hole, and the remainder space was completely covered with my small washer – it works seamlessly.

Mount the SMA adapter in the hole.  This can get tricky depending on how your cable was made because the hinge mount passes under where the lead is still fixed in place.  Don’t jerk your lead around or you may disconnect the wire from the jack.  You should unscrew the hinges and place the jack in the hole, then gently return the hinges to their mounts.  It may take some troubleshooting skills to get it to work, but it’s not difficult by any means.

Now you just route your new antenna wire on with the other 2, return everything to normal (take your time) and plug your antenna into a U.FL jack on your card.  If you went with a .11N card, you need all 3 antennas; I used the far #3 plug for the external ant.  I don’t know the mechanics but it should work in any configuration.  G card users can just leave one of their antennas free and should be fine – if you ever intend to upgrade to N in the future you are now N capable!

I can’t attest to the performance gain from just replacing an internal antenna with an external one, but if you used an N card with a compatible N router (I went with XSpan .11N 2.0) then I can confirm a working (theoretical) 300 Mbps wireless connection.  To top it off, I’m using Madwifi drivers and can confirm their functionality as well.

Thanks for following this development – comments are welcome.

I got my router today – here’s my immediate thoughts after about an hour of use.

I’m writing this assuming you have not read any of my previous posts.  I hope this helps anyone shopping around / is just curious about this.

This is the Belkin N1 (non-vision model).  Model #F5D8231-4.  I own a 5th revision of the model (v.5).

I bought this used off of ebay for $50 (+$8 shipping).  The MSRP is $129.99, meaning the market price is around $100 new(ish).

I read many of the reviews about this specific router and all the problems people supposedly had with it, many said that it was consistently intermittent (around 5 minutes uptime at best).  I also experienced some very unexpected and unusual problems.

I’m quite experienced with routers;  I’m not good enough to develop custom firmware or hack extra memory (although I’m sure if I had the tools for soldering surface mount ics I would have a good shot at such hardware hacks, should they be possible) or anything like that, but I have configured many wireless routers for people whose commercial tech support failed them and I have done trouble shooting for most common problems for alot of people for money (which makes me a professional, I guess), combined with formal CCNA training (which isn’t that useful for this particular application imo).  That being said – I have never seen the errors I was encountering and to be honest – I’m not sure what remedied them, however, they are fixed and I’m having a good experience now.  My N card is still being shipped from China, so I can’t test the xSpan features yet, but so far things work – which removes a variable should I encounter problems with xSpan.

I took pictures of it right out of the box:

It isn’t in perfect condition, but it appears to have suffered no serious physical anguish.  We will get to the mental anguish it clearly suffered in a moment…

As you can tell by this picture, the dimensions of the router case, based on the stock photo and the other shots were deceiving.  Based on all the 50° – 70° shots I assumed it was shaped a little shallower and narrower, but it’s got quite the generic box form factor.

Typical port layout; 4 10/100 lan port and a wan port, white box is recessed reset and black is 5v supply input.  The blue labeled white button is their ‘wi-fi protected setup’ feature which I guess is like a combination of AOSS and mac filtering for admin privileges or something real gimmicky – I haven’t read much on it and I disabled it because wpa2 is enough security for me.

From the manual:

WPS uses WPA2 (described below) for encryption. It does not
provide additional security, but rather, standardizes the method for
securing your wireless network. You may use either the Push Button
Configuration (PBC) method or PIN method to allow a device access to
your wireless network. Conceptually, the two methods work as follows:
PBC: Push and hold the WPS button located on the back of your
Router for three seconds. Then initiate the WPS procedure on the client
device within two minutes. Refer to your client’s documentation on this
procedure. Pushing the PBC button will automatically enable WPS. The
client has now been securely added to your wireless network.
PIN: The client device has a PIN number (either four or eight digits)
that is associated with WPS. Enable WPS through the GUI shown
below. Enter the client’s PIN into the Router’s internal registrar
(accessed through this GUI). The client will be automatically enrolled
into your wireless network within two minutes.

Yeah, not interested – but I’ll keep it in mind for further research.

Bottom label – has both Macs, Serial and the Pin which has something to do with the white button above.

The lights look real cool on this router – other than that there is only one notable feature here: there is a light that notifies a connection to the modem and a separate indicator for a wan (internet) connection.  This comes in handy when troubleshooting whether or not the connection to the modem or the modems connection to the provider is the problem.  Very appreciated, I’m sure.

Taking a quick peek inside reveals the 3 antennas with magnet grommets (very nice – you may notice these on quality cables because they help with filtering external line noise  – not going into the physics behind inductors and magnets though so google up if you’re curious).  You see 3 samsung chips, which are the nand memory – looks to be a great deal; I don’t know much about the architecture but I can believe that it has exceptional memory, but the firmware probably demands this much, being N draft 2.0 and having all sorts of interesting features.  Custom firmware people take notice (DD-WRT), as I noticed there is minor work being done on the N1 vision but not much else on this chipset.  Nothing else too interesting here for me.

Now on to my experience.

After finding out that the default gateway is 192.168.2.1, I got this in my browser:

(Thanks to ChrisOim who posted his similar error on dslreports.com for the image)

I tried connecting with a different computer, tried 3 browsers, I connected the router to the modem and reset the router multiple times and it made no difference.  I downloaded the firmware but there was no updates for this revision so it won’t take a re-flash; I tried doing it with TFTP but to no avail.

I eventually did a hard reset and then set forced my network connection to a static ip (192.168.2.2) and after a few tries managed to get some stable looking menus.  Occasionally it would screw up and I would have to wait a while and try again.  This went on for about an hour.

I’m not sure what happened, but I eventually managed to get the menu to stabilize long enough for me to configure everything I needed to get WiFi to work – when I logged into the menu using a wireless connection, it was almost perfectly stable – the only problem being when I save settings I have to refresh the /post.cgi to actually apply the settings and redirect back to the menu.  The drawback is that although the wireless is blazing fast and stable even in .11G, it takes forever to navigate and connect to the setup menu through wireless (it wasn’t always this way so I think it’s another intermittent problem thing – it was doing it when I took the screenshot but now near the end of writing this post it’s back to normal speeds….  I suspect it has to do with the ‘check for firmware updates automatically’ setting.)

Once I realized this I sat down and configured everything the way I wanted it – I looked through all the features and found nothing revolutionary (dd-wrt has settings for tx power and can enable about 6 different router modes and even create vpn subnets that you can place ads on and make revenue from broadcasting an isolated limited wireless connection to the neighborhood).

Lack of CFW support and the boondoggle with the setup menu I experienced in the beginning aside – I’m not upset about this router purchase.  I’m not going to cast a verdict until I attempt to utilize 802.11n xSpan on this, but for now I’m getting very nice speeds in Utorrent – the Upnp is working very nicely compared to my dd-wrt enabled linksys router, which slugged along when there were more than 2 computers running upnp on the network at once, and upload speeds above 20kbps shut the network down to a crawl.  I’m not doing anything heavy in utorrent right now since I’m trying to get my demonoid ratio back in the +1.– range (I’m only .93 right now so don’t hate me for leeching, but we’re talking about 50 gb of data between .93 and 1.0 for my stats), but I’ll definitely take a ratio hit to download something and check how fast bittorrenting is on an N connection with this router  (can’t be any faster than plugging right into the modem, so I’ll compare it to the speeds I got with dd-wrt).

That’s about it.  I’ll post back if I have any epic fails with this device before I get the rest of my .11N hardware, otherwise expect the next update to be an installation of the 3rd antenna in my Aspire one – which may be a multi-day update.

Very excited.

I’ve done some research on Atheros’ XSpan tech, and surprisingly most of the press releases are only a day or 2 old.

Apparently the 802.11N draft is in version 2.0, which is now professedly extremely stable, but yet still relies greatly on compatible technologies as each company has it’s own style of 11N.

XSpan is actually a chipset technology for their 11N 2.0, and only a few commercial products posses it so far.

The Atheros card I mentioned (AR5008E-3NX) was actually the first N card to be approved for miniPCI-E standards, so I’m pretty solid on picking one up now.
The questions that I’ve now brought up deal with router compatiblity.

Apparently N tech is extremely picky, even to the point of non-functionality between 2 N devices.  You have to have a compatible N variant on both the card and the router.

Luckily I’ve found a handful of routers that are confirmed to be using the XSpan chipset, and the most impressive one I found was the Belkin N1 and it’s smokin’ hot sister, the N1 Vision.

Check out the pictures.
I’m pretty positive I’m spending what little funds I have for this project on this set up:

Atheros AR5008E miniPCI-e card

A UFL to SMA Pigtail cable to connect the 3rd antenna to the card (I own several antennas with ufl connectors on them, from simple little black ones like you would get stock with a pci card, to a badass ‘plate’ dish).  This is where the actual hacking is gonna take place, since I need to dremel a hole in a suitable location on the side of my computers case to mount the connector and route the cable to the card.

Belkin N1 Vision Router – gonna go used and try to score one for less than $100.

I plan on ordering everything today so that it can get shipped out first thing monday.

I’ll post back then.