Internal pcmcia 802.11n mod

This is my final internal pcmcia mod. All other mods were practice for this wirless N mod. References are: My first semi successful attempt here and second successful attempt here. For this mod I chose the linksys wpc600n-rm (found here) because it was only 20$ shipped and warranty wasn't an issue. :-D

The same basic concept was used as before. But as I don't know the details about how N uses mimo and multiplexing I decided to use the original antennas instead of retrofitting others. This unfortunately made this into a larger mod (uses two slots instead of one).


First I cut the card just short enough to fit inside the slot, applied heatsinks and glued the pcmcia aligning rail on. (The wpc600n does have heat issues and will throttle badly if not cooled) Pic here.


Then carefully soldered the three antenna leads and a ground lead to the now separate antenna board and then glued the antenna board to the top of the heatsinks. Pic here.


The completed mod connects slightly slower then the stock one (due to internal laptop shielding), but has far superior connection stability. It should be noted that the wpc600n has a very curious (bug?). Modded and unmodded the card will throttle back to a connection of ~11Mbps and idle there. But as soon as there's any significant load on the connection it will throttle up to max connection speeds. This has no apparent correlation with powersaving features.


Finished mod pics are here and here.

Detailed results are:
Before: 216Mbps ~ 270Mbps dropping to 11Mbps ~ 54Mbps after 5 mins of heating.
After: 162Mbps ~ 270Mbps stable.
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