Homemade AirPort 802.11 Card

My latest hack of the day was taking a dead Airport base station and turning it into an internal Airport Card for my Pismo PowerBook.

Apple's first Base Station (Non-Airport Extreme) has a Lucent Technologies WaveLan IEEE 802.11 PC Card inside it.

This Card can work as a PC Card in a PC Notebook and with third party drivers on a Mac PC Card slot.

It also can double as a Native Airport card when connected to an Airport slot and it uses Apple's Native drivers.

The only problem is the WaveLan is 1 inch longer than an Airport card. It is also too thick for my Pismo. I got out my putty knife (in this case a flat head screw driver) and took apart all the plastic and metal that surrounds the card. This resulted in a paper thin Airport card that I was able to fit into the Pismo.

One draw back, DHCP did not work with the homemade Airport card. However, DCHP with Manual Address works fine.