Powerbook G3 Pismo does not recognise Belkin F5D7011card with Broadcom chipset.

[fergycool]

Now I've got the battery pack of my Powerbook G3 Pismo rebuilt and working I need to get wifi working! I looked at the price of non-extreme Aircard on ebay and they seem really high! So I looked for third party cards. From a few posts it seems that Belkin F5D7010 with Broadcom chipsets are well supported by Airtalk out of the box on Mac OS9. So I got myself this card for not much money at all (£3 + postage!).

Belkin Wireless Notebook Network Card 802.11g 54Mbps VER 1100 F5D7010xx

(I'm guessing the v1100 means v1 and it does say "Broadcom..." in the FCC ID approval text on the back of the card.)

Except it is not recognised at all! It shows up in Apple System Profiler (for both Mac OS9 and OSX) as a PCcard with identifier but no model name. In Mac OS9 a generic icon appears on the desktop. But that's about it. Airtalk in both Mac OS9 and OSX Tiger does not show anything at all.

Am I wrong in my conclusion that all Broadcom Belkin cards are supported? Is the card just not working? Should I just bear the cost and get an Apple Aircard? Any other thoughts gratefully welcomed.

BTW I am aware of the issues with using WEP. I have just setup a WRT54GS v1.0 to use for WEP (yes the OG!). Was very pleased to see even the latest version of DD-WRT still supports it. I acknowledge the security risks of WEP but I'll put it on a different subnet to protect my own network. Plus geographically I'm located in a fairly rural location and there's no passing traffic other than dogwalkers!

Cheers Ferg

 

[bibilit]

Hi, only some units will work, I made the same mystake many years ago… so have a brand new card, but pretty useless.

Only rev 1315 or 1112 are known to work just as the original card.

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/resources/belkinairport.html

 

[fergycool]

Hi, only some units will work, I made the same mystake many years ago… so have a brand new card, but pretty useless.

Only rev 1315 or 1112 are known to work just as the original card.

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/resources/belkinairport.html

Thank you.

 

[fergycool]

I could not find v1351, however, I did find the UK version F5D7010uk - v1314uk . I guessed such a minor version bump was mainly due to geographic variations. Plus I found this old Apple forums post saying it worked for them.
Unfortunately under Mac OS9 Airport just does not see the card (although the lights of the card are illuminated!). However, Airport under OSX Tiger does work without any extra drivers. After reading that post yet again I realise that the Belkin cards only work with OSX and not Mac OS9! Whoops!
Anybody knows what 3rd party cards are supported with Mac OS9? Thanks!

 

[CC_333]

Anybody knows what 3rd party cards are supported with Mac OS9? Thanks!

I think the only cards known to work with Mac OS 9's ancient drivers are cards derived from the ORiNOCO WaveLAN series of PC Card adapters. This works because the AirPort card itself was derived from the WaveLAN Gold card.

However, since they're all functionally identical, there's really no point in bothering, as all are likewise limited to 11Mbps throughput and inferior WEP security.

c

 

[obsolete]

Although I have not personally tried them, there are more options for Wifi on OS 9 than the Orinoco/Airport hardware: https://lowendmac.com/2009/wifi-pc-cards-for-powerbooks-running-mac-os-9/

 

[fergycool]

Thanks. Will have a look for one. Now that the Pismo has battery power (rebuilt battery pack giving five hrs +) my aim is to sit on the sofa and "do something online!". Not quite sure what that "something" is, but hey it's a great objective for this retro Mac hobby!

 

[adespoton]

Thanks. Will have a look for one. Now that the Pismo has battery power (rebuilt battery pack giving five hrs +) my aim is to sit on the sofa and "do something online!". Not quite sure what that "something" is, but hey it's a great objective for this retro Mac hobby!

Connect to a Hotline server and chat with some people?

 

[fergycool]

Connect to a Hotline server and chat with some people?

Great idea. I haven't connected to Hotline servers that much at all. Amusingly I connected to the hotline.macos9lives.com server yesterday to check if there were any airport drivers/extensions that I was missing. But that was the first time for a long time. For chatting which servers would you recommend?

 

[fergycool]

Although I have not personally tried them, there are more options for Wifi on OS 9 than the Orinoco/Airport hardware: https://lowendmac.com/2009/wifi-pc-cards-for-powerbooks-running-mac-os-9/

I went and got a Belkin F5D6020 from that list. Unfortunately, as luck would have it, there are two versions of the card. Only v1 is supported and guess which one I bought? Oh well, it was very cheap! I tried the MacSense and the IOXperts drivers and neither of them support it either!

 

[MacUp72]

this is the Orinoco version with complete installer that worked most of the time on my machines with 8/ 9 and my Orinoco Gold/Silver or equivalents..other WaveLan versions didnt, it correctly recognizes the chip version..

And under OsX I just use a common, cheap Gigaset Siemens 54 PcCard that is being recognized as AirPort Extreme natively.