|
Zonet ZCF1100
rates it:   Community rates it: (no ratings yet)
563 of 1114 readers found this review helpful.
Zonet CF Wifi
I recenlty purchased one of these little cards for my zaurus, but due to not having a CF card that i can flash with my zaurus is still a rather pretty brick.
This testing is done on my Toshiba Laptop under linux with a SanDisk PCCard->CF bridge (no driver needed)
You can find these cards at BlueProton.com or on ebay. They are fairly cheap, especially if you are just dipping your toe into mobile wifi.
I do own some other Zonet Products, and I must say, Zonet are fairly well known for selling 2 devices with the same model number but radically different chipsets. for instance, thier PCMCIA wifi card, the ZEW1000 can either be a prism2 or atmel chipset card. yet the card reports the same manfid and model :-)
That aside. the Zonet CF Wifi card is actually a PrismI device.
the standard linux drivers should be able to handle this very well.
using the orinoco_cs driver the card works well, but does not support the 'monitor' mode used for network sniffing.
To get this working with the orinoco driver insert the following into your /etc/pcmcia/config file
card "Zonet CF WLAN"
manfid 0x000b, 0x7100
bind "orinoco_cs"
apparently this card is also supported by hostap and by the wlan_ng drivers.
The following are comparisons between this card and my Lucent/Dell Truemobile 1100 card. The Access Point used is a 3com combined wireless 802.11b router and switch indoors
| - |
Distance |
Rate(mbit) |
Quality |
SNR |
| Zonet CF |
2m |
11 |
72/92 |
- |
| 8m |
2 |
42/92 |
- |
| 12m |
1 |
40/92 |
- |
| Lucent PCMCIA |
2m |
11 |
80/92 |
+53dB |
| 8m |
5.5 |
42/92 |
+42dB |
| 12m |
5.5 |
39/92 |
+38dB |
Conclusion
The card seems to be 'fairly' good, and I do not feel i have wasted my money, It takes about 10 seconds to associate to my network here, (the lucent does it instantly) but that isnt a problem.
128bit WEP works fine on this card, the above tests were carried out with this enabled. The adaptive rate fallback does seem a little sharp with it dropping to 2mbits after about 5m but that is still faster than the CF slot can do anyway.
It's range isn't excellent, but it is a whole lot better than the Zonet PCMCIA cards (those didnt even let me associate at 8m indoors)
Please note, the distances are inside my very old stone house, wireless inside here is especially bad, you can probably expect about 25% more in range/rate/SNR if you have a newer house and place your access point carefully.
Added: Saturday, July 17, 2004
Related Link: Zonet ZCF1000
hits: 5206
|
