Laptop WiFi 6E Adapter Upgrades

[Tech Junky]

Well the original had 2 wires and this has 3. Optimal would be the outer antennas vs matching colors. The whole color thing is a gimmick anyway. Just pop off the middle one and put on the other edge. You already know they're finnicky and just use some caution to pop it off the card. Use a toothpick or something to get under it and pry it up off the card. and put the other one back on.

Once it's done you can leave it alone forever or until it doesn't work anymore.

if you want proof of better performance do some speed testing across multiple servers or grab a wifi analyzer app to see the signal strength in different areas and make notes / switch the leads and repeat. The original antenna board had middle/edge but, W/G leads give you the outer edge coverage.

Who knows why Dell put the original antenna in the middle and not the edges. SMH it doesn't make much sense and revising the design proves 3 are better than 2 but also putting them on the edge makes more sense than in the middle. The 3rd one in the middle would be a plus if AX adapters had 3 antennas as an option.

Or just leave it alone if you're happy with the speeds / coverage you have now.

 

[Tech Junky]

Speaking of sniffers - https://www.acrylicwifi.com/en/wlan...oftware-tools/wlan-scanner-acrylic-wifi-free/

I hadn't bothered with installing anything on the laptop and just used my phone typically so, this was helpful in looking into options. The only thing about most of the free options is turning off their analytics after installing. This one is straight forward in doing so from the menu.

It gives some helpful nerd info as well in comparison to vistumbler which might be good for basic wifi levels updating on the screen vs acrylic which is a bit more verbose.

 

[SAL9K]

The antennas will be fine. Make sure however that your laptop doesn`t use a BIOS whitelist to allow only specific wifi cards, and that your region actually allows the use of 6 GHz (at the software level, not just regulatory). Here in Canada, my AX210 only started allowing 6 GHz with a recent Windows Insider update despite regulations having authorized these channels back in May 2021. I haven't checked if it was enabled on Linux, but a few months ago the Ubuntu release I tried did not enable 6 GHz channels in Canada yet.

In my case, I upgraded a Lenovo Ideapad 5.

I'm running Win 10 Pro 21H1, with the 64-bit drivers direct from the Intel website. In Device Manager the device properties show that the "Ultra High Band (6 GHz)" is enabled. So bios/region wise it seems like the card/driver install went ok. However, (and obviously) I'll need a 6GHz AP to verify things are working.

Intel AX210 Drivers