I bought the NetGate card with 2 antennae, because they said it was
"long-range" and I want to tap as much "free" public WiFi as possible (in the
Sarasota downtown area). I also have an Orinoco Silver card here without
antennae, and here are the results when compared accessing a hotel's WiFi
network.
They both get over 11Mb/S in connection speed which is good enough especially
when it's free. What I'm more interested is the signal strength of the two
cards which I obtained using the kwifimanager tool. Here are the results in
this particular situation.
Card Config Signal Strength Range dBm
Netgate with 2 antennae 50-80 (5 bars solid)
Netgate with 1 antenna 32-44 (4-5 bars)
Netgate with 0 antennae 0-10 (mostly no signal)
Orinoco Silver (no antennae jack avail) 20-34 (2-4 bars)
I like the Netgate card for its performance, but it's about double the price
of the Orinoco Silver and the antennae are pretty flimsy and tricky to detach
without breaking them off. They really need to fix the design on that. I
wouldn't buy it without both antennae.
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