Connecting to the Internet

The great thing about the Jornada is it's built-in 56K modem. It gave
me such a kick to connect it to the phone line and try dial-up again
after all these years and hear all those noises emanating from the
machine. I must have been really handy at the time to just plug in a
cable and connect for your email or web.

Fast forward to 2013 and to be honest, it's not so handy any more.
It's more of a bind than anything else. I did toy with the idea of
carrying a modem cable around with me, but I knew there had to be a
better way.

So back to ebay and I found a cheap PCMCIA wi-fi card called the
"Cabletron Systems Roamabout Wi-Fi". Setting it up wasn't so easy
though. There seem to be quite a few of these listed on ebay at the
moment in the UK and appear on searches for "Jornada", so there may be
a few people stuggling like I did.

Firstly, I couldn't find the correct drivers, and spent a lot of time
installing and uninstalling drivers to no avail. The drivers supplied
with the card were of no use. The correct drivers, which I eventually
tracked down are in the repository on the right if anyone needs them.

Windows CE 3.0 cannot support the WPA encryption that my wireless
router uses, and I didn't want to drop the security to WEP, so once
again I had to be a bit more creative.

On the router I set up a guest network called "Jornada". In the router
settings I made sure that it was set to not broadcast the SSID,
meaning other computers would not be able to see this guest network.
You would only be able to connect if you knew the name of the network.
On the back of the Roamabout card is something called a MAC address.
This is a unique identifier for the modem card, so if you set up a MAC
adddress filter on the guest network for this address, it will only
let this particular card connect. I left the guest network unsecured.

That done, I added a profile in the Roamabout settings. When it asked
for SSID I had to type this in because it is a hidden network. I made
sure the security settings were left open and finished the setup.

Lo and behold, it worked!

To be sure it's not going to be the fastest connection to the
internet, but you don't need it on a device of this age.

Out and about, I suspect there would be problems connecting to public
wi-fi hotspots because of the security, but at home this works fine
and dandy.

In any case, I have just ordered a Nokia D211 Wi-Fi/GPRS card from
Amazon second hand, which should solve the mobility issue once set up
with a pay-as-you-go SIM card, so I'll let you know how that goes.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720