Yesterday, we shared a tip to make use of an external USB WiFi adapter on Apple Mac computer's for better wireless experience. Luckily, the experiment Killed Two Birds with One Stone as it made the 40Mhz wide WiFi width usable in 2.4Ghz spectrum which is not made available with the built-in WiFi card. As evident from the screengrab posted below, the external USB card also makes use of full 300Mbps bandwidth resulting in faster file transfers over wireless link.

Apple iMac and Macbook's built-in wireless card is known to have limited coverage as it does not feature an external antenna for better signal reception, however we can easily boost the Wi-Fi signal strength and range of any Apple Mac computer using external USB wireless dongles with external antenna. To get this working make sure you have an WiFi USB Adapter which is compatible with Apple Mac OS X and have drivers available for it, luckily for me the Realtek 8191 Chipset based Mini 300Mbps USB Wireless Adapter we used earlier to hack and make Asus O!Play wifi capable did the trick.

Once you have your wireless usb adapter connected to the Mac we need to identify it and install the correct driver for it, We will be using the Mac OS X "System Information" utility (find via spotlight search) to get our hardware information as shown below.

Tweaking your WiFi configuration for maximum throughput sometimes have adverse side-effects, we have already seen how changing your WiFi channels can create problems with non-standard or incompatible WiFi cards.

Having customized your WiFi config can also create strange problems like WiFi being visible and connectable but with limited functionality and no web-browsing. As evident from the screenshots on the right and below my iMac running Mac OS X 10.8.2 is having issue communicating with my router, after researching over the internet reading numerous forums and help articles I finally figured out the solution experimenting with my router config.

Imagine the confusion when your WiFi network is showing all available WiFi access points in the neighborhood except the one you want to connect to, adding more confusion - the same access-point is visible and connectable from other devices. Since, your WiFi access-point is visible from other devices and your WiFi client can see other access-point we can be sure that the two particular devices are working fine and are only having issues communicating to each other.