How to 'pigtail' a DWL-650+ or variant. (e.g. Pheenet WL-0022, USR 2210 etc)

Standard disclaimer: This worked for me, it may not work for you. This will clearly invalidate your warranty. If it doesn't work don't blame me. If you break anything, tough. If you skewer your hand with a minuture screwdriver, yes it hurts.

1. Open the case.

The PCMCIA card is held together with metal strips down each side. These need to be slid forwards (towards the connector) with a small screwdriver and then levered away.

Then the top and bottom metal covers can be lifted away (away from the connector), the plastic panel on the underside (opposite the lights) can be eased (with varying degrees of force depending on how much glue is on it) out with a small screwdriver.

2. Remove mini connector.

Next task remove the minuture connector. Carefully heat up and de-solder around the edge as much as possible. The with a really small screwdriver, lever off from the right hand side (bottom in the above picture).

4. Attach antenna cable.

Cable attached.

Finished card.

5. Results.

Well the internal antenna is still active so I was still getting a signal without the antenna attached. Secondly the drivers I was using didn't offer any antenna diversity selection, so I'm assuming the drivers are automatically selecting the strongest signal. Anyway, to test, turned on AP in the house, and walked off down garden with laptop and a cantenna attached.

At the end of the garden (approx 100 metres) no signal was showing with just the internal aerial. Connecting the can gave a solid 80% signal strength.

Guess it works just fine then. Only oddment is that the activity LED isn't blinking any more, I wonder if it blew during the desoldering..... ah someones pointed out I've knocked the resistor off the board doing my desoldering! oops.

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