Well to make matters worse, I didn’t really even buy it. It’s payment in lieu of another debt, so It’s kinda free.
Still, the dudes at the Apple store put the thing in and I even asked them about the antenna, they said it doesn’t need it.
I will admit that I can’t really gripe too much about it since it’s “supposed” to have one, but nary an “expert” pointed that out until you. Can’t wait until I buy an external HDD, I imagine that may take 3 or 4 trips to the Apple store to get it working right.
Nah. Just get a USB or Firewire unit, plug it in, and off you go. It really is that simple - unless you buy one of the cheaper ones, then you have to take the additional step of formatting it with Disk Utility. (The really cheap ones don’t come formatted sometimes.)
In all fairness to the Apple guys, that’s “vintage” hardware. They probably saw the cable leading away from the card slot and assumed it was like the iMac G5s (which have the antenna concealed in the case). Try them on the Mac Pro and they’d have done better.
It’d be like me taking an E-type into a new Jaguar dealership. They’d not know all the quirks of the old beast.
I’ve played around with Agere WiFi cards in laptops. These are not PCI type cards, they are cards like ram cards that fit into a slot under the covers underneath the unit.
There is a tiny connector port on top of the card for the antenna - no actual voltage runs through the antenna.
All you need do is connect just about any kind of wire to it. As long as it is 12-16 inches long, it should give you plenty of signal.
So find your antenna port, get a short piece of spare wire, strip the end and plug it in there. You’ll get a signal.