purchased wrt

wrt54g overview
I stopped by good old compusa and picked up a V4 WRT54G. approx $45 after I get the money back from the mail in rebates. not a great deal, but not a bad deal. gives me something to play with over christmas.

I've gotta go off on a tangent about compusa. as one of my instructors says "i'm getting up on my soap box" (and then make gesture for size/shape of box, and then 'step' onto said box). Compusa is sub best-buy. bestbuy sucketh because they bought geeksquad and made geeks even lamor than they already were... as if thats possible. what kind of geek drives his girlfriends BUG. thats no way to run a business. pasty geeks never see the light of day and then you stuff em in a car like that and no one will ever let them out in public again.

oh yeah.. compusa. so why is compusa sub best buy? becuase their parking lot is CRAP. yup. you heard me. here in town it is the most ghetto parking lot around. I never felt I was impressed one way or the other painted asphalt, but let me tell you, after you see the decaying lumpy turf these guys call a parking lot you want to puke. I actually had to look twice at the store as I was sure the banner out front was a going out of business sign. I made it through the door and was greeted by geeks only slightly above the tallent of 'the squad' at the rival yellow electronic store.

I found the isle with the router and they were sold out. not wanting to admit defeat so quickly I spoke with 'customer service', and yes, that does need to be in quotes, and no the thought does not count. they said they had 68 in invetory even though none were on the shelf. turns out they don't stock them on the shelf, they stock them k-mart style on a shelf way up in the middle of no where where you actually need some little ladder to get them down.

I got mine, and like an idiot forgot the serial number list to cross reference the serial number to board rev. I looked all over the box for a version and couldn't find it. I figured it'd be version 5 (vx works... pass on that) and asked the cashier if I could take it back once opened if it wasn't what I wanted. they said I had 21 days or something. so when i purchase it the guy scans the serial number on the outside of the box!! I was like wooooo... hang on man. why are you tieing the serial number to my name (I always pay with credit card, maybe I should re-evaluate that). He actually didn't take it too hard and explained they have alot of people that purchase one, swap it out for a dead one and return it. chalk one up for the getto compusa. I can live with that but I still don't like the serial being tied to my name. oh well...

first impressions:
I'm thinking this is the router that dan had. I can't remember. its about twice the size of my netgear (i have two of those). I think it runs a little hot (had it on for 10 minutes), and the default IP is 192.168.1.1 instead of the more traditional 192.168.0.1 that my netgear ones come with.

is it a keeper?
yup.. I haven't put new firmware in it yet, but since its a verion 4 it is suppose to be linux based so I'll be playing with openwrt. it has two antenna slots (switched, not truly dual) with standard connectors. my thoughts are to run power and cat5 on a pole and mount this baby and its new antenna on a pole and see how far I can go. theres some fun antenna designs (see cantena bellow) so I'm looking forward to that. I'm thinking worst case I could actually canabolize one of the antennas that came with it to use the connector, and then tell openwrt to just use the slot I plug a good antenna into.

I actually got it up and running and dialing my SBC modem in about 10 minutes. the stock FW doesn't seem that terrible, despite what you may read.

for grins and giggles..
a funky omni design
more antennas
I knew I wanted the dish!
antenna modeling