Adding Recessed Wifi Antenna to EEE PC 1000HA
The Inspiration
Quite a long time ago, I upgraded my EEE PC 1000HA wifi card with a nice Atheros 5008 card that supports Backtrack 3, Wireless N, and a third wifi antenna.
Inspired by Vinhtvu2's external wifi adapter on the eeeuser.com forums, I decided to do a similar mod of my own. So I bought the antenna on eBay. Unfortunately, with my small EEE PC case, I didn't want to do the exact same mod as it sticks out too much. And I was afraid to hack away while the warranty was still valid.
So finally, a year and a half later, I was inspired by a random modding blog to try putting in the antenna recessed into the ethernet port.
And it worked fantastically!
The Hardware
The process was tedious (took about 4 hours), but rather simple:
1. Disassemble the entire EEE PC (excluding the LCD screen), which consisted of removing the bottom hatch, the hard drive, RAM, and wireless card, the keyboard, separating the plastic casing, and removing the motherboard and all of the connectors. There are many guides online; that's not what this tutorial is for.
2. Finally, once everything was separated, I had full access to the bottom of the ethernet port. I used a dremel with a cutting head and cleanly cut off the very bottom. I turned the motherboard upside-down and placed the RP-SMA connector down in the port and used Loctite 1-minute instant mixing epoxy. I used a nice amount and it hardened very well; I don't think the connector is going anywhere.
Epoxy (Click for bigger image)
RP-SMA connector inside ethernet jack (click for bigger image)
3. I gently sent the motherboard back into the casing to see how it would fit. There wasn't enough room for the antenna's RJ-SMA connector to fit inside, so I took the motherboard back out and took the dremel to the plastic case and made the hole a bit wider, as you can see in the picture of the final product.
4. I checked to make sure that it fit now. It did! So I put everything back together (putting the ribbon cables for the touchpad and keyboard back in was not fun) and locked it up tight.
5. Nervously, I pushed the power button. It booted up and everything worked - whew! There were a lot of connectors that I was nervous about (I luckily took a picture of the motherboard before I removed it.) With everything working, it was now time for some hands-on testing!
The Results
Antenna (click for bigger image)
Antenna, Netbook closed (click for bigger image)
Antenna Nub Straight (Click for bigger image)
Antenna Nub Side (Click for bigger image)
All of the power results are from testing in Backtrack 3's terminal.
2 internal antennas only: ~25
External antenna only: ~22
External AND internal antennas connected: ~40
So, as you can see, the results are quite good! It was a fun mod, and it was interesting to see the EEE PC internals. The extra signal will be nice sometime when I am in the middle of nowhere on vacation and want to check out my emails! After all, what good is a netbook if you can't get on the 'net?