At 11:15 PM -0400 2003/09/25, Derrick J Brashear wrote: > Sorry, let me rephrase: "I can find no chipset documentation" for the > chipset in the Airport Extremes. So far as I know, it is not publicly available. Because all 802.11g chipsets to date are basically just software defined radios, they are physically capable of listening and broadcasting on a much wider frequency range than allowed by the 802.11g specifications, including many frequencies used by law enforcement, emergency services, and gov't (even including classified communications). This is why Atheros has a proprietary Hardware Access Layer driver for which an interface is defined, but no other information is available. That HAL prevents you from trying to program the radio to do anything that is not allowed by the 802.11g spec. Broadcom reportedly also has a HAL driver, but has not publicly released any information about it, although various companies have been able to sign NDAs and develop drivers to work with it. A number of different people are involved in trying to reverse-engineer the drivers, in particular from some publicly available binary drivers from companies like Linksys for their new 802.11g base stations. There are some people involved in trying to reverse-engineer the Atheros HAL driver as well, but this effort is not receiving nearly so much support from the community because there is a functional publicly available interface which can be written to, and therefore there is little need for an Atheros driver that can get all the way down to the hardware. > Ah. I have no extreme, so I could try it, except that I don't have one of > the other ones either. I wonder if there's anything around that would make > it worthwhile to have one. Five times faster network throughput? Support for WDS bridging, so that you can have up to four base stations act as wireless repeaters for the master base station, using just the one built-in card? In the case of the Apple Airport Extreme, the built-in port so that you can plug in external antennas (e.g., Dr Bott omnidirectional and unidirectional) and get even greater range? The ability to use the Apple Airport Extreme base station to share a USB-attached printer across the wireless network? -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@xxxxxxxxx> "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania. GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+ !w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++) tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)