Netgear MA101 & RedHat 8.0 HOWTO: The Different Revisions of the MA101

2. The Different Revisions of the MA101

Most of the 802.11b devices with Atmel chips in them have the AT76C503A, but of those devices some have a radio made by Intersil (mostly older devices), and some have a radio made by RF Micro Devices (RFMD) (mostly newer devices).

Its important to know which radio your wireless device has, because it affects how you compile the driver, and this results in a different name for the resulting driver module.

There are two revisions of the Netgear MA101 that we know of: Revision A and Revision B, and they both look the same.

2.1 Identifying Your Wireless USB Device

To identify a usb wireless device there are a couple of things to check. The easiest are:

FCC ID
USB Vendor ID and Product ID

Somewhere on the device (the sticker on the base?) there is probably a FCC ID number - if the device is sold in America it is supposed to have one of these. With the FCC ID you can find out details of the device at the FCC ID database. Also, once you have the FCC ID, check the numbers listed for the Rev.A and Rev.B devices below, or see the USB device table to find out what radio type the device has.

After you plug in a USB device, type dmesg and you should see a log entry like:

usb.c: USB device 6 (vend/prod 0x864/0x4100) is not claimed by any active driver

You can also run lsusb or cat /proc/bus/usb/devices to find out about devices already connected to your computer. Compare the vid/pid against the numbers below, or against the entries in the USB device table.

2.2 MA101 Revision A

This is obviously the older of the two. It has the following properties:

FCC ID : PD5LMWU110
USB vid/pid : 0x864/0x4100
radio type : Intersil 3861

2.3 MA101 Revision B

Most recently bought MA101's appear to be of this type.

FCC ID : PD5LMWU300
USB vid/pid : 0x864/0x4102
radio type : RFMD
if all else fails, look at the sticker on the bottom of the device.. it says 'Rev.B' :-)

Next Previous Contents