Orinoco Gold connection problems

hi, i just bought a Orinoco Gold 8410 card for my Jornada 690e & installed the CE 2.11 Agere drivers. i'm having trouble getting my wireless network to work. whenever i set my network to Open (no WEP), it connects instantly. but when i set it back to Shared Key (WEP), it won't connect to the network - the status screen on the Agere client always says "Searching"

i have a Linksys WRT54G WAP. here are the settings:
Channel 11, Broadcast SSID, Key 1 - 128bit Hex WEP, DHCP enabled

i set up a profile for my home network in the Agere client & i tried typing in the key again. i even tried switching it to key index 2 on the router & changing the same setting on the Agere client - still nothing. i also tried manually inputting my TCP/IP settings in the Network control panel applet.

my laptop connects to my wireless LAN fine and so does my Axim (running Windows Mobile 2003). i'm stumped and frustrated. any ideas??

The 8410 card is made by Proxim. According to the Hardware Compatibility List, there are no compatible drivers for Windows CE 2.11. I thought the Agere driver was for the older ORiNOCO cards (like mine). (I haven't tried using encryption yet, though.)

HCL just says this: "32-bit CardBus adapters are incompatible with Windows CE."

but there are 16 bit versions of 8410 and 8420 as well. they're compatible.

as for the wep problem, i'm unsure...

i just checked the card - it's a 8420-WD (oops - not an 8410) with an Agere Systems chipset. it's a non-Cardbus (16-bit) card & i got the drivers from this site. i checked the HCL & read thru the forums on this site before i got the card, to make sure i was getting the best one for my Jornada.

the WEP thing is my big problem... any ideas?

Edited by striker 2005-09-16 12:20 AM

Sorry to be so long in replying; I've been away from the Internet for some weeks.
I don't think you'll be able to get WEP to work on the Orinoco Gold card.
I have one--and love it--but because Orinoco's WEP protocol is unique to Orinoco, I've not been able to get it to encrypt across the network. I think it's possible if you have two Orinoco setups, both using Orinoco's protocol.
I tried for awhile to make it work, then found some reference somewhere on the net which suggested it's not possible. Don't ask me where...
WEP isn't a great protocol anway, or so I've heard. So I'm very VERY careful about how the rest of my wireless network is set up and never send unencrypted (before I send, I ZIP a text file with password protection. Not perfect, but better than nothing) any message which contains information I'm not willing to have anyone see/read.

sorry but it is nonsense. WEP is a standard protocol, orinoco WEP is just like the others. you have some other problem, for example you're not using the correct driver. for example orinoco drivers may be partially compatible with prism drivers but you'll lose the WEP ability.

well, i'm glad there isn't really a problem with 'different WEP.' there's NO way i'm disabling WEP just to get the HPC connected. i loaded the drivers i found on this site's HCL (Agere, i believe). i know others on this site have used the Orinoco card with WEP in their setups... any idea what's wrong with mine?

I finally got a chance to try this out at my buddy's house. He's got a Dlink router configured for 128-bit WEP, broadcasting the SSID. It still couldn't connect to his network when I typed in the WEP key. I bought this Orinoco card because I read on these forums that is supports WEP well. Why isn't it working?

hmm... maybe you could just enable MAC address filtering in the router.
128 bit WEP is easily hackable nowadays. (of course MAC filtering can be cheated too..)

do you use vxutil to check settings? it could be really useful.

is this card an orinoco gold?

there are several drivers for it, not all of them are good.

Which drivers are you using? I am having problems with my "Upgraded" iPAQ (Compaq iPAQ 3870 running WM2003 as apposed to PPC2002) where the card just will not detect for some strange reason, yet, I use the same card on CE2.11 with no problem and CE3 no problem (H/PC Pro and HPC2000).

Oh and the problem applies to both, the ones on the CD an the ones from the website, but I am starting to prefer the web based ones, bcause they have a more compact UI (the UI doesn't fill up the entire screen, but a small box instead).