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I just bought a new iBook with an airport card and wanted to interface to an Intel ProWireless 2011 base station. The base station if of course 802.11b compliant. This would seem like an easy task but there are some undocumented settings that need to be set before a matchup like this will ever work.
1. In Intel base stations and likely many others such as 3Com etc.. you have the choice of using 1 of 4 encryption keys. I learned if you use encryption key 2,3 or 4 it will never work at all. The Apple Airport card/software will only look at the first key. Hence if you set it to key 1 and use the key as the password on your apple with a dollar sign in front of it you are set. e.g. $4545acd3f5ec4s......I was able to use 128 bit encryption successfully!
2. You must disable short preamble on the Intel base station so it will use long preamble. This was stated in the Intel documentation as allowing 3rd party wireless compatability.
When you have done both of these things you will be up and working fine. I took three sources of info to pull all this together. Intel, Apple for the $ trick and http://www.macwindows.com/airportpc.html web site for the encryption key trick.
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