I was just curious if it would work and what would be supported, so I popped an Orinoco branded “Classic” gold (128 bit) PCMCIA card into a Richo PCMCIA bridge (which as been working fine with Prism 2.5 cards) on my Intel D815EGEW motherboard (Celeron 900Mhz cpu, 128mb ram). Mikrotik 2.9.23 with license is level 4 is installed on a compact flash card.
When I boot the system up without the card inserted, it gives ‘unhappy beep’ when I insert the card. When I boot the system up with the card installed, it gives appropriate ‘happy beeps’ and i have a “wavelan1” interface on bootup.
On my first boot up, the unit crashed within 1 to 2 minutes of boot. Oddly though, as I’m typing this it’s been up a lot longer - about 15 minutes now. In that time I’ve made a couple more observations:
- The AP I have the card assosicated doesn’t show up under the registrations table as it should.
- AP mode is obviously not supported
- Scanning is not supported (there is an OSS driver patch for this guys!)
- Signal quality, strength, and noise level are all correctly reported. As far as I can tell, anyways.(yay!)
- There is no regulatory domain selection, and all 14 channels are available. This really should have a ‘domain’ dropdown which limits the channels selectable.
Receive B-test gives stable 6Mbps results - best I’ve ever seen with a hermes to be honest. Send is also 6Mbps, nice to see the same both directions. “Both” runs between 2.5 and 3.3mbps, and they seem to trade off. RX will run 3.3 and TX will run 2.5 for a while, then they’ll trade. Still, good results. The AP for this test was an RB532, 2.9.23, and Prism 2.5 radio.
I’m not sure what caused the initial lockup now, as I’m putting it under load and it’s not doing it again. I will continue testing and post if I have further lockup problems.