It’s been a few years since Wi-Fi became essentially ubiquitous but there are still a few areas where the average consumer isn’t served. Sure, there are lots of great routers and Wi-Fi cards of all stripes, including beasts that run at 802.11n speeds and have ranges of five billion miles, give or take a few billion. But there are are a few places — high-quality USB adapters and Wi-Fi-to-Ethernet bridges, for example — where where the Wi-Fi market is under served. The Wi-Fire from hField stops up at least one of those holes.
The Wi-Fire his a long range USB Wi-Fi adapter with drivers for OS X and Windows (Peter talked about it in September but I thought it might be good to give it a second look — they also reduced the price). It is about as big as a USB card reader and packs flat for portability. First, let’s look at some of the numbers. Using a standard G wireless card, I saw about 9mbps in speed tests. Using the Wi-Fire, I averaged about 9.5 to 10mbps — not an amazing improvement. I was, however, able to leave the house and go about 400 feet away from my access point and still maintain a strong connection. The numbers, as a whole, stood up to hField’s claims of 300-1000 foot range using the adapter.
In terms of general usage, the Wi-Fire is fairly simple to install and use. You plug it in, install some drivers, and you’re golden. The directional antenna can turn 360 degrees and includes an integral monitor clamp that lets you hang it off a laptop like a webcam.
Clearly, there is a dearth of these devices mostly because they are so rarely needed. Built-in Wi-Fi adapters are everywhere, so why add something that hangs off of your laptop like a barnacle. As Peter wrote, the Wi-Fire is great for stealing Wi-Fi from your neighbors. They’ve reduced the price of the Wi-Fire about $30 — it’s now $79 online — which could make for a good aid when deciding when/if to get broadband to the hotel or even at home.
Be careful when purchasing Wi-Fire, it didn’t work for me and I have sent them 4 emails and left 2 phone messages (no one ever answers the phone) trying to get a return number and they won’t respond. It’s starting to look like this is a “Fly by Night Outfit” at best.
I have to agree the software for Leopard is not really functional it often causes kernal_task to eat up all my cpu cycles and nothing but restart will fix the issue. Great idea, but useless without functional software. Still no sign for their improved Version 2.0 software either even with a Summer 2008 release date.
Been using this for about a month now, and I find it no better than my internal antenna. In some cases it’s even worst than my internal antenna.
Yes.. it can pick up signals farther away than my internal, but most of the time it doesnt even connect.
I’ve tested my wifi, I got download speeds of 20-30 kb with Wi-Fire..
With my internal antenna I was getting download speeds of 300-500 kb
Keep in mind my internal antenna is nothing special, just a cheap antenna, yet it out performs the Wi-Fire.
I just recently acquired a Wi-Fire unit. It was gray like the one pictured here.
A few notes on this one. For starts, I don’t think it’s worth $80. The third party wireless software bundled with this unit is a choppy hack at best; it consistently crashes. The hardware mount is crap, and the unit really isn’t that powerful. I honestly doubt it’s using 500mw.
I was able to get the item to connect on both my Macbook, my Macbook pro, and my 1.67ghz pb G4, but not without frequent restarts/reinstalls/forced quits. My longest stretch of connectivity was roughly 5 hours. On my Macbook and G4 pb, I did notice an increase in signal strength. However, on my Macbook Pro, signal was slightly weaker than what the stock Airport card achieves
I was unable to see a reduction in either latency to my game servers, or an increase in total bandwidth using the Wi-Fire. In fact, most of my ping times increased by 20-30ms. I suspect this is due to the crappy drivers. I would recommend a Hawking product instead. DO NOT BUY
I agree with most of the other comments. Not worth the money. I’m a truck driver and often found signals that were too weak or not consistent while on the road. The WiFire seemed like the perfect tool to help amplify those weak signals and possibly even find a few more.
Unfortunately, it did not live up to my expectations or the reviews I read before I bought it. I realize that line of sight is important and that objects and structures can limit connectivity so I did take that into consideration.
As a test I connected to a signal using my built in antenna and was able to get a half-decent signal. Not great, as I was about 600 feet from the signal, but I had a clear LOS and the signal was useable. Thinking that this was an ideal test for the WiFire, I plugged it in and spent several minutes fiddling with the nearly useless clamp and clumsy software until I managed to find the signal. It connected, but the signal strength and speed was more or less the same as my built in adapter (it fluctuated whenever I so much as breathed on the WiFire).
At other times, it would pick up the same signals as my built in antenna, plus a couple more, but if i tried to connect, it just seemed to go into an endless “Connecting…” loop.
Bottom line – don’t waste your money. Under certain conditions it may work as advertised, but I played with it for a month before I gave up and put it away before I was tempted to boot the damn thing across the parking lot. All I got for my $79.99USD (plus $30 shipping to Canada) was a lot of frustration.
Works great with Vista and Windows 7. Didn’t install any drivers, just connected it while I was already connected to the internet. The driver was downloaded from windows update and installed. I didnt have to deal with the 3rd party software that way.
The Wi-Fire is _directional_ antenna. You need to point it in the direction of the signal. Signals tend to bounce off of objects, so you may need to point it in a totally different direction that what you think.
It makes no sense to criticize this antenna by saying “my internal shows 100% but the wi-fire shows 80-90%”. Note that Wi-fire was made to better your connection distance by supplying a very sensitive antenna combined with a very small reflector focused in a specific direction. The oversensitive antenna over saturates close in which is why you see erroneous measurements for your close by/home network.
I question the credibility of some of the negative tests reported here. I myself am able to connect to a neighbors network and speed test shows 7Mbps down, 3Mbps up. The network is about 300 yards away. Signal strength is 50% whereas I could not see the signal with my laptop.
Great antenna except the clip-on really is a joke. Better to set it on a flat surface.
One has to understand antenna design and working characteristics to fairly test the unit. Many people are just too ignorant to know what they are doing in their hokey test process.
Unit is well worth the money as long as the buyer UNDERSTANDS how to use it.
This device is so weak that I decided to dissect it.
Turns out all this crap is a cheap USB antenna ( you know the ones you see all over the internet that people try to sell)
So you have a cheap USB part, then there’s a second part, the antenna. It’s attaches to the USB with a small wire.
The antenna it’s self is just a green mother board with the wire solder on, and a couple of strips on metal.
If you want to waste money on this go ahead, other wise there’s cheaper USB antennas that do the same thing.