MacBook Pro Airport Card Power Signal Transmission confirguration
Is there anyway to adjust the Airport card (internal mini-pci wifi card) in terms of transmission strength and power settings. In Windows in the hardware setup there is always a setting to control how the system handles power management (options for more aggressive power savings vs more aggressive signal strength) for the internal wireless card. Is there a plist or some place to manually set this on the MacBook in OSX? I've got my MacBook sitting right next to my brother's Dell and his notebook gets "Excellent" strength connecting to a wifi router and my macbook gets between nothing and very low in the same spot. I have to assume this is because the hardware setting for the card is not providing full strength. Anybody know how to override whatever default settings OSX is configuring to force full power all the time?
Mac Specs: MacBook 2.4 GHz, 4 Gb, 320 GB 7200 RPM WD Scorpio, OS X 10.6.2, Win 7
I don't know of a way to adjust signal strength for the MacBook or Pro models and don't believe there is a hardware adjustment. Suggest you first go over all your Airport settings making sure you have everything entered correctly. You can check your settings with what your ISP recommends and additionally from the router internal menu setup.
It might also be helpful to test your MBP out in another wireless area and see if you are encountering the same signal strength problem.
Yeah, I've got everything configured right. It works fine if I just move closer to the access point. There may not be a hardware adjustment for it. It's the same Broadcomm chip that the Dell uses in there wireless cards, so the hardware itself supports it. It may be that the Mac driver doesn't support configuration of the power settings on the card, but I doubt it. My guess would be that the Mac driver is just doing what it thinks is best, probably balancing performance with battery savings. There should be some low level method for adjusting this like by command line or plist. It could just be that the antenna is better on the Dell notebook somehow.
We (my father and I) have exactly the same problem. He has a brand new pro and I have an older gen macbook black. I have a full strenght signal but he gets nothing !
If smn has a hint or whatever, please let me know...
Or we have to wait that steve fixes his products before he launchs them!
