welp, I received the apple airport yesterday, and the 3com card today. The 3com card is going in an IBM thinkpad 240 notebook. In anticipation, I had downloaded the latest drivers (windows 2000 drivers) from 3com's web page, and also the software package from karlnet that Drakino had pointed out.

I had problems right off the batt, because the 3com didn't know what net it needed to belong to. The airport's manual is skimpy at best, and constantly refers to help balloons in the mac software. (first problem... I don't have a mac!)

I finally searched the newsgroups and figured out that the net name is supposed to be:
AirPort Network ###### (where the #'s are the last 6 digits of the network number on the bottom of the airport..) so in my case,
AirPort Network 231c46

(in case you're curious, the default that the 3com wanted to use, and which, of course, didn't work, was simply "101".)


It took me a pretty good while to configure this thing. I had to have it see my windows 2000 desktop, as it is the dhcp server/internet connection sharing machine. The software from http://www.karlnet.com/download/index.html helped to see some of the options on the airport, but it took me just that much longer to figure out the changes weren't instantaneous - you had to actually "save config" to the adapter before it took them...

Even after configuring the airport to grab a number from ethernet/dhcp, I had problems with it.. It refused to grab a new number, and insisted that it was a number it wasn't. no problem - went back in the software and forced a number on it (192.168.0.200) - this number is within my private IP. I also set the subnet mask as 255.255.255.0, and the router as 192.168.0.1 (w2000 box's ip)

Next came the notebook. DHCP didn't work on the notebook, so after banging my head against the wall a few times I finally forced an IP on the notebook (192.168.0.201) , and told it to use subnet 255.255.255.0, and gateway 192.168.0.1. Everything seemed to work at this point.

So, while looking at the link status, I pulled the plug and picked it up - oops.. there goes my connection! At this point, the ping session I had in the background started failing, despite the card still being in the "excellent" range w/ the airport. Took me forever to figure out what it was: apparantly, there's an option which lets the card perform differently when it the laptop is plugged into the wall, and when it's on battery power. This simply didn't work! unfortunately, it took me 2-3 tries (and 1-2 hours) to figure this out. Disabling this feature and restarting made everything work peachy dandy:)

Setup aside, I was pretty impressed with the apple airport. the range on this thing is actually alot better then what I expected. I was able to go throughout the house, and even in the back porch without any problems. My house is fairly large, and easily 200-250 feet from one end to another - the airport actually managed to perform above it's 150feet limit spec.

I'm going to try to hook up the empeg onto a lucent ethernet <-> wireless convertor next. I'll let you know how this goes as soon as I receive the new empeg, and when/if I find a decent deal on the wireless ethernet convertor:)
-mark

...proud to have owned one of the first Mark I units