Product Reviews

We cover a lot of wireless products designed to increase range and performance for one reason: wireless networks rarely work as well as they should. The HWU54DM is the latest product to offer increased range and throughput.

It looks impressive from the outside. The fat antenna is loaded with LEDs, which give you a reading on the signal strength from the wireless network to which you're connected. As you can rotate the adaptor 360 and adjust its angle by 180, it's possible to get the best-quality signal without having to move your PC or notebook.

The HWU54DM contains a 5dBi antenna, which provides a boost from most adaptors' 2dBi antennas. It comes with a USB dock, so you can use it with a desktop PC without having to reach round the back

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to make adjustments.

The bundled software installed easily on our PC and gave us an option of a Wifii [sic] mode for compatibility or Performance mode, for maximum throughput. We chose Performance mode and finished the install. But we ran into problems when trying to connect to our default test network. We could physically connect, but the HWU54DM refused to get an IP address automatically when encryption was turned on. This was strange, as we were trying to connect to a Hawking wireless router. Even stranger, we could connect to a US Robotics wireless router with encryption and get an IP address.

We reset the router to default settings, turned encryption off and managed to connect. But turning encryption back on caused the same problems. In the end, we had to reinstall the driver software, use the WiFi mode and change USB ports.

The performance results below show that throughput was about average, but that doesn't tell the whole story. The HWU54DM would work for long periods of time, then suddenly drop the connection and become a nightmare to reconnect. When it worked, performance was fine, but the stability issues worry us. With that in mind, we can't recommend this wireless adaptor and suggest that you opt for the larger, but better, Hawking USB Wireless Dish Adapter, reviewed in What's New, Shopper April 2006.