home 
wiki
wiki
AppleAirport
Apple AirPort Base Station
Apple introduced the Airport in 1999. It was the first simplified AccessPoint, and one of the first 802.11b devices to become generally available at a reasonable price. Inside it contains a 486 AMD processor, an OrinocoSilver card, a 10-Base-T Ethernet port, and a 56k v.90 dialup modem. It runs a proprietary Karlnet firmware prepared for Apple. The hardware is largely the same as a Lucent RG1000, and Airport firmare can be loaded into the Lucent unit.
There are now five variants of the Airport Base Station: the first-gen "Graphite", the second edition (two Ethernet ports), the Extreme (54mbs 802.11g), and the Express (54mbs 802.11g) which also acts as a cross-platform USB printer server and iTunes audio streamer - ie it has audio line out ports, which can be streamed to from any machine on the network.
AirPort Cards are proprietary 802.11b cards with no antenna, relying on an antenna built into the host device (iMac, iBook, etc). They fit in a proprietary Airport slot in compatible machines. Airport Extreme cards are 802.11g cards for newer machines, and not backwards compatible with Airport slots. Older machines wanting .11g speeds will need to look at third party solutions.
All Apple base stations and cards can network with Windows, Linux, etc machines.
Further information is available at the
Apple wiki page.Vitals - Graphite
- Manufacturer : Apple
- Model : Apple AirPort Base Station ("Graphite")
- Type : AP
- External Antenna Jack: No
- NB there is an antenna jack on the internal WaveLAN card, but you'll need to hack a hole in the case to let the pigtail out.
- Chipset: AMD x86 embedded CPU, Lucent chipset
- Transmit Power : 15 dBm (nominal)
- Recieve Sensitivity : same as WaveLAN card
- Drivers URL : http://www.apple.com/support/airport/
- Ports RJ-11 modem, RJ-45 Ethernet, 12V DC power
- Available New : No - Extreme and Express only
- Average Price : $AU 100-150 on eBay
- Vitals last updated : 21st August 2004
Official Details - all models
- Specifications From AppleSpec
- Apple's Airport Support Page
Pictures
Operating Systems
- Configuration tools are available for MacOS, Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and Java
- Network functionality is cross-platform
Firmware
- Karlnet proprietary or AirportLinux
Misc Notes
- Information on repairing the common power supply failure on Graphite Base Stations is avaliable at the Apple wiki page. This failure is caused by a combination of bad capacitors and overheating, and has apparently been fixed on later models.
- If the modem card is not in use, removing it will substantially reduce power consumption and heat.
Other pages
Version 3 (current) modified Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:49:29 +0000 by clae
[EditText] [Spelling] [Current] [Raw] [Code] [Diff] [Subscribe] [VersionHistory] [Revert] [Delete] [RecentChanges]