Wi-Fire

Wi-Fire

I was approached a few weeks ago by hField Technologies to review their Wi-Fire product since it is a perfect fit for people who are on the go, such as folks who need to entertain business calls 24/7 on their latest mobile phone and particularly truckers who have laptops and would like to increase their range for wifi hotspot connectivity. 

The Wi-Fire is a product that acts as a wireless adapter with a high gain antenna.  Best of all, the design of it is meant to be used on the go with a retractable USB cable and slick fold up design, it is compact and easy to stick in a laptop bag. 

I was particularly interested in reviewing the product because I had built a cantenna a few years ago using a coffee can experimenting with increasing the range of my wifi signal.

After firing up the laptop and experimenting with the Wi-Fire, I am pleasantly surprised at the results.

 I used an Asus EEE PC 900 Netbook with XP as my test machine.  It is a small 8.9″ laptop that I use when traveling and is the one that I would likely be looking for a wfi hotspot somewhere, so I thought I’d see how it did with this unit.  I tested from my home where the built in wifi card picked up 13 access points, I was curious to see after installing the Wi-Fire how many more would show up.

The setup instructions for the Wi-FIre were very easy to follow, basically just pop the CD in and load the drivers up, then plug the device in, no reboot required.  The device shows up as another wireless card, so you could use this to enable wireless connectivity for a machine which doesn’t have a wireless connection.  I recall back to a warehouse installation I did with a machine that was about 300 feet away from the access point, the internal wifi card produced too weak a signal to reach the AP.  If I had an external adapter, I likely would have had better luck.

I fired up the wireless manager software that is loaded with the driver to see what it did.  It provides a very intuitive interface showing access points that are close by.  I compared the number in the list to what I had previously and was amazed that 22 showed up now, 9 more than I had previously been able to see.  The product worked as advertised, it definitely boosted the visibility of my wireless access.

I thought I would do another test and load it up on my other laptop which I currently use Ubuntu 8.04 Linux on.  It loaded up just fine and was recognized instantly by the operating system, no drivers needed which I did not anticipate.  I observed the same results there with regard to an increase in connectivity.

So I’m pleased to give the Wi-Fire a big thumbs up and recommend it to anyone who travels around and needs internet access looking for hot spots, or if you have an application where you need a signal boost, this is a cheap (< $100) way to gain this functionality.

Please visit their website for more information and feel free to drop me a line or share a comment.

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