Full height wifi card in WWAN slot? m11x r1...

quick question...


I have a few intel 4965agn cards around that are 10x better than the stock crapcard.


Will a full height wifi card work in the WWAN spot? or does it use a different standard?(USB, msata, etc)

 

the wwan card slot is a usb port in pci form.

 

If you really want to replace it, you will have to buy a half sized one, intel 6205 and 6300 work great, bigfoot 1002 and 1003 also.
they are really cheap and worth the investment.
As ejohnson said, wwan will not work, most mpcie tracks are inactive except USB signal and +3.3V

 

I got AlienWare m11x R3, i7 2637M, and a native intel 6205 half-sized card in the WLAN slot which works perfect.
In the WWAN slot I've put another Wi-FI card (Atheros A9281).

in `lspci` I see this:

Code:

...
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 540M] (rev a1)
0d:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
13:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Advanced-N 6205 (rev 34)
19:00.0 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller (rev 30)
...

in `iwconfig`:

Code:

...
wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:"WIFI" 
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.452 GHz  Access Point: Not-Associated  
          Tx-Power=16 dBm  
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Power Management:on
...

I can switch channels with e.g. `iwconfig wlan0 channel 1/11`, put the interface up/down with `ifconfig wlan0 down/up`, even soft-block it with rfkill.

I rebuilt the kernel to disallow module unloading and enable debugging on the ATH9K, that way it's not Hard-Blocked each time I boot up.
Until that I used this command:

Code:

echo "enable" > /proc/bus/pci/0d/00.0

(taken the device address from the exhaust of `lspci`).
A few seconds later `rfkill list` would give me:

Code:

0: phy0: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no
1: phy1: Wireless LAN
    Soft blocked: no
    Hard blocked: no

but after `ifconfig wlan0 up` I would get a kernel panic.

So now it seems I resolved the kernel panic issue, and still not sure where I'm going with that, but having the interface up, it cannot see any networks, neither on windows nor or linux, (yes, on win7 I got it showing up and treated as a wlan interface adapter, but it's blind).

`iwlist wlan0 scan`:

Code:

wlan0     No scan results

I tried inserting the SIM card into the SIM slot, but nothing works on any of my OS's.
Please, advice if it's due to the lack of pins in the WWAN slot or just some other sf/hw issue?

P.S.
I'm gonna try to swap the cables the next time when I open my baby, but I doubt it's the cause, I'm sitting right by the router, it should've shown at least some signal in the scan results even with no antennas attached...

P.P.S.
I'm also going to tape the pin 20 on my atheros card, the guy from this thread http://www.thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=103458 solved his issue like that.

 

Excellent! It worked!
As I planned: I just taped the Pin 20 on the wifi card, and swapped the connector from ANT1 to ANT2 (not sure if it was necessary).
Now I got 2 working wi-fi cards on my laptop!

Now it seems to be possible to insert an additional mpcie SSD/WIFI or pretty much anything else in the WWAN slot of m11x R3.
The thread can be now marked as "Solved: ", even though I could only confirm that for R3, not R1/R2.
Thank you.

 

How about a photo showing how you taped it off, and which one it was.

 

That's great! I like Mr. Fox's idea, would love to see it.

 

Sorry for taking so long to reply. I've been working on the tutorial for more than a month, day and night.
So far this is what I got for you, to explain the extremely complex process of how to tape pin 20:

1. Click here and press the "Google search" button
2. Click "Images" on the top
3. In the pile of pics, find the ones which look like mini-pci-e cards
4. Take a piece of tape and put over that pin (so that electric current won't pass from the board to/from it), put the card in
5. Tell your schoolmates that you're a hacker

Feel free to ask more details in this thread, I'm going to check back and see how many people know how to use scissors.
Have fun!

P.S.
This is a bonus because I love you: