Alfa AWUS036NH 2000mW 2W 802.11g/n High Gain USB Wireless G / N Long-Range WiFi Network Adapter with 5dBi Screw-On Swivel Rubber Antenna and 7dBi Panel Antenna and Mini bendable Flex cable and Suction cup / Clip Window Mount

This is a really well thought out cool piece of kit. The suction cup is ideal enabling you to stick the adapter to a window (and the cable is long enough to enable this) or you can just affix it to the top of your laptop with the clip. The flexible/bendable usb cable is ideal if you just want to sit the adapter on your desk and have a shorter cable. The 7dBi panel antenna will pick up signals you never thought were out there - and just placing this antenna in a different position or turning it a few centimeters will get you some different signals. Both antennas just unscrew and both have joints at the bottom so that you can rotate them easily.

To be able to take advantage of new cable installations you really need a faster wifi setup and the new "n" standard allows you to do this. Whats the point in having fast cable coming into your home if your old "b" or "g" wifi adapter is the bottle-neck in speed. 802.11g standard supports a standard of 54mbps (although you can sometimes get faster than this) whereas the new 802.11n standard supports up to 600mbps. The antennas with this adapter will give you a good strong signal to support high speeds.

I also use this adpater for security testing my wifi system mainly using Linux Ubuntu. I use it with Aircrack, and I have not found any problem injecting packets etc - everything works, just use the generic USB driver that Ubuntu installs - there is no need to download firmware or try and install the correct drivers (you will spend hours, even days trying this and then it may not work).

For those of you into using Aircrack I found the best way is NOT to use airmon-ng to put your adapter into monitor mode but instead use "sudo iwconfig wlan1 mode monitor" (your adapter may not be called wlan1) and then up the card with ifconfig: "sudo ifconfig wlan1 up". This works fine. You can also change your cards mode to "managed" by first downing your card (sudo ifconfig wlan1 down) and then using "sudo iwconfig wlan1 mode managed". When your card is in managed mode you can change the channel by "upping" the card with ifconfig and then using "sudo iwconfig wlan1 channel 11" (or whatever channel number) - this allows you to inject etc on a specific channel.

The install for windows is pretty straight forward and it installs an interface which is far superior to the basic windows UI and gives you a far better overview and many more options. The install instructions for Linux are pretty poor - but if you use Ubuntu then as mentioned the generic USB driver does everything. However, there will be settings that you cannot change on your card in Linux if you only use the generic USB driver, for example, you cannot utilise the iwlist command to its full potential (but I have found that I have never needed to do that anyhow).

This is a fantastic package, Windows users who just need to get a stronger signal will find this easy. Linux users who are looking for a little more will have to do more work to get it working as they want but it is well worth the effort.

I purchased this to improve reception in my kitchen; down to 1 bar from the existing router about 14-20 MBps. Even without the extra antenna fitted it boosted it to 4 out 5 bars and up to 54MBps. Install is simple, kit and fittings are particularly high quality.

I needed something to enhance the signal my netbook picked up from our router (we had the most powerful router we could find) but the netbook's internal WiFi adapter dropped out a lot and I was getting pretty frustrated. I found the Alfa a bit faffy to set up but once installed it works like a dream. 3 stars overall as set up wasn't as easy as I'd like (no CD drive on netbook) and a few issues turning off my internal adapter but 5 stars for the coverage it got from the Alfa.