Never easier.

The ease with which full function wi-fi can be installed in a Hackintosh has never been greater or the cost lower.

What follows assumes you use an Airport Extreme (AEX) or Time Capsule (TC) wi-fi router. My AEX is a Gen 1 (2008), single band only, but Gen 4 AEX/TCs and later are dual band, meaning that they can support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz (802-11n) devices simultaneously. With the advent of iPhone 5 most of my ‘go to’ devices now support 5GHz, including Hacks, iPads and iPhones, so dual-band is not a requirement. We do have two devices in the home which are 2.4GHz capable only, the xBox 360 and the old iMac G4, and these are set to receive their broadband signal directly from the A&T Uverse router which is 2.4GHz, 802-11b. As usual, the Telephone Company is a decade behind. Everything else looks to the Airport Extreme and now uses the 5GHz band.

The Hackintosh wi-fi issue has become much simpler over time. First one used an external USB wi-fi dongle with the associated (awful) Realtek software. Then TP-Link came along with internal PCIe cards which delivered Airport capability and, later, when OS X Lion came along, AirDrop functionality after you messed with Pref files some. You would buy the TP-Link PCIe card then an aftermarket wi-fi card which was an SOB to install in the card owing to the fiddly connectors. After application of cable ties and solder for the joints you destroyed, the card worked fine.

The other day I learned from the excellent Tonymacx86 Hack forum that TP-Link now makes a dual band wi-fi card which integrates the PCIe card and the wi-fi card. The model number is TL-WDN4800 and Amazon has it for $35 – which is less than the previous card + wi-fi card combination cost and is a plug-and-play installation in any Hack. B&H Photo also carries the card for a similar price. (Prices seem to fluctuate daily by a few dollars). The card comes with regular and low-profile brackets, the latter for use in Hacks built in Micro ATX cases.

Here are the old and new cards, antennas removed:

And here are the before and after results on one of my Hacks – the one with the botched old card installed, one antenna missing, replaced with the new card. A two minute job:

Clearly, having three working antennas does no harm. Comparing the speed of the new card with a properly installed old one at a like location, the new card consistently reports download speed 10% higher than the old, possibly attributable to superior antenna design.

There is but one quirk. The Airport Extreme defaults to channel 149 with 5GHz wi-fi, whereas the new TP-Link card only goes up to 48. So, go into Applications->Utilities->Airport Utility->Airport Extreme->Edit->Wireless->Wireless Options and set Radio Channel to 48, then Save. Your new TP-Link card will now be visible to the Hack in which you installed it.

Setting the Channel to 48 in Airport Utility.