i picked up a microsoft mn-710 usb 802.11g dongle, last friday. the microsoft company store had them for $40 (access points for $70, pci and pccard nics also for $40). with the recent purchase and bastardization of a linksys wrt54gs, i thought i should at least have one 54mbit/sec capable nic in the house.
looks like we just started producing these and are discontinuing them. circuit city had them for $40 ($20 after rebate), but were all sold-out, of course. they are back in stock, but sans rebate. i found them online for as low as $34.
hoping to find that it was a prism 54, broadcom wl, or another hostap/openap/linuxap/freebsd-capable chipset, i looked at the fcc filings for it. the fcc filings were submitted by microsoft with testing done by a company called, 'adt,' (advance data technology corporation). all the chips in the photos were photoshopped black. nothing relavent. note to self: revisit for power output specs.
the device is not listed in the wlan-ng list of prism gt devices. interestingly enough, though the pci and pccard (mn-720 and mn-730) versions appear to be broadcom.
took the thing apart... sure enough, there's a prism 54, a "netchip" usb ic, and one other ic.
i used the new version of netstumbler and wardrove (wardrived?) home, picking up a number of ssid strings i'd never seen. most interesting was a pair of networks seen (albeit weak signals) while at the apex of the dunbarton bridge. "Allison South SJ Link 3" (in BSS mode with a Proxim MAC address) and "Allison North SJ Link 2" (same). wigle.net maps this right next to the newark mall, 4-5 miles away!
i picked up a pile of new networks while headed toward mission on decoto, paseo padre, peralta and walnut. one, in particular, cracked me up, having seen reference to it, only days before.
i'll take it apart, again and photograph it. i'll also plug it into a host with a more flexible os, so i can pull the vendor:deviceid pair off it and try to force the prism 54 development driver on it.