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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.