Alfa AWUS051NH 500mW Dual-band Wireless USB Adapter

I've had this item for 6 months now and couldn't be happier. It was so easy to set up, even I could do it. My desktop that I have this connected to is 3 rooms away from the router and I have no problems. Speed is fine so is connectivity. I don't recall getting my signal dropped at any time since I've had it. I was going spend much more money on a different model and am soooo glad I didn't as this one works perfectly fine.

This thing works perfect for my all my wireless needs. I use ubuntu and this works great. Also works with aircrack-ng.

Traveling through parts of Asia with a thirst for uploading photos and catching up on family news, I found most Wifi weak and barely functional, but since the general populace doesn't use Wifi, it's difficult for them to support. In the middle of Paris and London, I find outsourced Wifi services to be broken without the provider knowing, weak signal, the bare minimum to be able to advertise "you can pay extra for wifi when you stay at our hotel". A device like this is crucial to help get the most of your 22 Euros per day in Paris, or snipe that weak signal in Udon Thani and Koh Samui. This is a Chinese product sold into the US, so it has functioning hardware but the productization is weak. For example, it is MacOSX compatible, but the driver disk doesn't work in a Mac slot-loader, so it's not actually been used on a Mac. The custom RALinkTech app to manage APs rather than using standard OS tools is a bit cheesy (the OS has a perfectly good way to choose which AP to use) The consistency of the MacOSX means that the 10.5 driver works in 10.6, and the upstream innovator has drivers available. I downloaded drivers from [...], installed v10.5 on OS-10.6.2, and it works fine. The device demands 450mA from USB, and uses a standard USB-mini cable for data and power: standard cable means less a lighter bag for those of us who travel. Antenna unscrews. Using Sharing, the AWUS050NH connection is shared through my existing Wifi to my mobile devices, to the other laptop with the poor-quality Wifi, and to my travel partners' devices poolside and in neighbouring rooms. Based on the short time I've used this, it works well once the working driver is found, fits easily into my bag, and gives me connectivity where it's otherwise poor-quality. My only issue is the extra effort to find the right drivers.

This item is not the best on the market. Yes the item is small which is nice but the sucksion cup that comes with it doesn't hold and the antenna strength is very week. I don't know what wireless adapter is the best on the marker I just know that this isn't it. I am currently in a location where I can't just use internet everywhere I go but there is wifi around my dorms. I wanted to get wifi in my room by using a antenna ( like so many others do around me). When I got the adapter I hooked it up to my laptop and placed the antenna out side my dorm room window where it can receive the wifi signal. I only got 1 bar out of 5, so I kept trying different adjustments and hieghts and locations. I even turned off my internal anetenna of my laptop. Nothing seemed to make the signal better. Then I decided to try going out side and caparing the antenna to my wireless antenna. When I went out side I got 4 out of 5 bars with my regular laptop and with the antennal working by it self I sometimes got 3 out of 5 but it seemed to work with 2 most of the time. Not what I expected. So for now I ordered an antenna that will attach to this adapter and extend mt reach to see if that will help. But really, this item is not worth the price. Keep looking around, you can find better.

Save your money and buy a Hawking brand antenna instead. These Alfa antennas (or software?) constantly drop the internet connection. After writing back and forth to the Alfa tech service department, and them asking me ridiculous questions, or claiming they couldn't reply because they were "on vacation", they have stopped responding to my e-mails. My Hawking antenna, however, works FLAWLESSLY!

Switched from a flimsy Netgear wireless-G that I've had to do all sorts of crazy things to make work, now I've got 70% signal from the opposite side of my house and getting speedtest scores of 18mbps streaming, amazing internet improvement, earlier I was running 2 downloads and playing CounterStrike: Source with a 40 ping all simultaneously.

Only u have to do is download the right driver. With the bundling driver, it wont work as you expect.

This is a great tool for the mobile road warrior.