Wireless Adapter Review: hField Wi-Fire

An Internet connection these days has become an umbilical cord for many people. Whether in an office cubicle, a college quad, or on the road with a smile and a shoeshine, a link to the cloud -- and a strong, solid link, with no erratic or dropped signals -- is a productivity essential. That's the kind of link offered by hField Technologies' Wi-Fire long-range WiFi adapter.

According to the vendor, the $59 gadget can boost WiFi range to as much as 1,000 feet -- three times farther than the typical 802.11b/g adapter built into a notebook. Better yet, it maintains faster speeds at longer distances from a wireless access point.

Installing the Wi-Fire is very simple. Before attaching the device to a computer, you need to install its software. The setup disc contains programs for using the device with Windows Vista or XP, Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5, or Linux kernel 2.6.24. I installed the software on a notebook running Windows 7, and it worked fine.

On a Windows computer, after the application is installed, an icon for the Wi-Fire manager will appear in the task tray. The icon may be hidden in Windows 7, but you can find it by clicking the "show hidden icons" triangle in the tray.

Next, you connect the Wi-Fire antenna. The roughly 2.3 by 4-inch wedge-shaped device can be attached to the top of a laptop display or placed on a flat surface. Using the cable packaged with the hardware, it can be plugged into any USB port on the computer.

When the hardware is connected, a message is displayed on the screen alerting you that a wireless network adapter has been successfully installed on your computer. The antenna is powered through the USB port so you don't have to fuss with an additional power supply. According to hField, Wi-Fire's power drain on a notebook's battery is only slightly greater than the draw of an internal WiFi adapter, which last can be switched off when Wi-Fire is in use.

Good Management

With everything installed and connected, you can launch the Wi-Fire manager by double-clicking its icon in the task tray. The manager's main screen lists all the networks within range of Wi-Fire, as well as their signal quality, security, and network type. As mentioned, Wi-Fire is an 802.11b/g adapter; it will detect and use 802.11n networks as long as the latter are in "mixed" or backward-compatible mode, allowing 802.11b/g devices to connect.

When you double-click on one of the networks on the list, a login screen will appear. After filling in the appropriate information, you click Connect and you're good to go. Once connected to a network, specific information about your link will appear above the list of available networks in the main screen. The info mirrors that found in the network list with the addition of the speed of the connection and its WiFi channel.

An advanced screen provides additional information about the networks within range, such as type of authentication used, encryption method, MAC and IP address, subnet mask, and gateway.

More Networks, Stronger Signals

Compared to the adapter built into my laptop, the Wi-Fire unit delivered more networks at greater strengths. For example, my laptop's internal unit found nine networks available from my living room. Apart from my primary home network, the signal quality of the other nets was either poor or fair at best.

Wi-Fire found 11 nets, three of them robust enough (30 to 40 percent signal strength) for a solid connection. And when connected to my home WLAN, Wi-Fire stayed at a steady 54Mbps instead of fluctuating in speed the way my notebook's own adapter usually does.

One nice thing about the Wi-Fire connection manager is that it gives you a more precise idea of signal strength. Typical managers display it as cell-phone-style bars, which can be very rough measures. For instance, the strongest signal strength, five bars, could be anywhere from 60 to 95 percent.

Wi-Fire shows signal quality as a percentage. What's more, you can rotate the Wi-Fire antenna in its mount to "aim" it at an access point and dynamically see how it affects reception. The technique may smack of the bad old days of "rabbit ears" and black-and-white TVs, but it works!

With its nearly effortless ability to improve WiFi performance, Wi-Fire is a worthwhile buy for road warriors troubled by "dead spots" when they travel, as well as vacationers connecting to WiFi at campgrounds and resorts or anyone disappointed by a home wireless router that won't reach to the living room or back yard. Even college students who live off campus and thought they were out of range of their university's wireless net may find themselves connected again.

Update 3/4/10: hField Technologies has lowered Wi-Fire's price to $49.