Home Repair of Apple's Airport Base Stations?

Peter DeWeese asks: "After hearing that my Apple Airport Base Station was fried and that Apple doesn't service them unless under warranty (they are considered disposable, Apple doesn't physically service any of them), I had the opportunity to see the insides. I was suprised to find a single board AMD computer with a PC card slot, an on-board Ethernet port, and an off board apple modem just like the ones in iBooks and PowerBooks. The PC card is none other than the Lucent Technologies WaveLAN Silver, with built in antenna. Turns out that the modem is blown from a recent ice storm here and I need a replacement. This modem is very standard looking, with a little on-board connector shared by all of Apple's xBook hardware. I removed it, and the base station still didn't work, but reset itself every 10 seconds. Also, what embedded OS is run by this AMD computer? The AirPort web site at Apple clearly states that it is loading a kernal when the 3 lights are amber."

"I also had to remove the PC card, which operated just fine in my PowerBook. It runs fine now, minus modem and 802.11, and I am left with a great little mini NAT-DHCP router, perfect for LANs and cable modems. It also will do port mapping, which is a cool feature. Thought this would be interesting information for the wireless fans out there.

I still would like my base station working again, and am wondering if by some fluke, the wireless card only works if the modem is working, or if I burned out some other circuit when the modem blew. Any thoughts?"

Wow...

[slashmonster]

We played with the tech witht eh Gold cards... Sounds like the board resets when the modem is missing due to a boot check problem....

Re:Wow...

[slashmonster]

Meant to say this at the beginning: We played with the Lucent Gold cards for a while. You should be able to do just about everything with PC card as you would with the Airport. You will need to download the proper drivers from Lucent, which has a new domainname for the WaveLan products, but I can't recall the site name.

Re:Wow...

[fwc]

The url is www.wavelan.com [wavelan.com]. There may be another one also since there are actually two parts of lucent doing the 802.11 stuff.

My understanding is that the airport is actually one of the Wavelan RG-1000's [wavelan.com] that has been relabeled, but I don't know that for sure.

If this is the lucent product, then my understanding about the way lucent handles under-warranty repairs is consistent with the apple policy - They don't repair them, they replace them. I suspect it's cheaper to just replace the hardware (since it is obviously not very expensive) than to pay someone to figure out what in the (#*@$ blew up.

The cardinal rule of dismantling hardware:

[AFCArchvile]

Don't expect it to ever work again.

However, you do have a nice WaveLAN card for your PowerBook, right? Sorry to be so harsh, but most of Apple's accessories are incredibly difficult to service. Just look at the first two generations of the iMac; their SODIMM RAM was so incredibly hard to access; you had to take everything apart. With the series of the iMac with the silver-domed speakers, all you have to do is unlock a panel on the underside to get to the standard PC100 DIMMs. Apple finally learned how to stick to industry standards, unlike all their products before they went colorful (the beige era).

OS on Airport

[Anonymous Coward]

the base hardware inside the airport is a Karl'snet bridge http://www.karlnet.com [karlnet.com] the OS was also created by Karl'snet

press release [karlnet.com] from Jan 2000

Grimlaf

PowerBook modem??

[ilbrec]

Somewhere along, I remember reading that the internal modem in an Airport is the same modem as the ones in PowerBook G3s (I don't know which series PowerBook, however). It was off of one of earlier reports of people who has taken an Airport a part...
This actually makes a lot of sense, as PowerBook modem was already available, low power small modem that Apple had, not to mention, unlike winmodems, that would be a real modem that is necessary for an embedded system like Airport.

Re:who's the bad guy here?

[babbage]

I dunno, maybe. I'm new to Apple hardware, having gotten my first machine -- a bondi blue iMac with a 233 g3 chip (completely first generation iMac hardware, as near as I can tell) -- from ebay last fall. I wanted to upgrade the ram so it would run OSX at something beyond a snail's pace and was thwarted three times: three times I took the damn thing apart (way more complicated than it should be), three times I dug my way to the ram socket, and three times did I discover that the ram I had purchased didn't fit for one reason or another (wrong length, then wrong pin count, then wrong alignment of the notch on the chip).

It may be "standard laptop ram", but no major store in Eastern Massachusetts seems to be able to provide it, and I'm told that my only avenue is specialty shops that might have it in stock. Bleargh. On the other hand, the OS is nice, if quirky...

Re:who's the bad guy here?

[gig]

There are a wide assortment of online RAM dealers who will sell you chips for a "Rev. A iMac". You don't need to worry about what part they are or whatever, just tell them what computer you have and how much RAM you want. One that I can think of off the top of my head is:

Trans International [transintl.com]

Check some of the ads on Macintosh-related Web sites (you can find a bunch of them in Internet Explorer 5's default Favorites list) for more RAM dealers.

Since Steve Jobs return, Apple has moved to easy-access standard RAM on all of its machines. You have sort of an intermediate machine, though. It is a PowerBook from that era built into a case with a CRT, and that forced them to make some compromises as far as the placement of components. These days, even the notebooks can be RAM-upgraded in only a few seconds ... you just pop-up the keyboard.