3. The Product, Continued

Only a single, non-upgradable external antenna is visible, but inside there is also a second antenna, which is fixed along the front right side of the plastic enclosure, to the right and parallel to the silver LED trip strip on the top of the case. GIGABYTE also thoughfully provides a snap-on plastic base, which either stands the unit vertically on a desk, or can be used for wall-mounting.

Packaging negatives are that the status lights on the top of the case are pretty wimpy, and I found I had to look at them pretty much dead-on in order to see them. I also wasn't wild about the Ethernet and Power connector locations on the left front corner of the case.

It gets the job done, but I found the Windows-only AP Manager (Figures 4 - 8) to be somewhat confusing in its operation. For example, it wasn't obvious that separate SSID's could be assigned to each radio after I slipped a GN-WLMA101 dual-band card into the A17's expansion slot. But after assurance that it was possible from GIGABYTE, I successfully was able to do this.

Most of my confusion was due to having the radio and mode selection on a different tab from the other wireless settings. Since most products' user interfaces require you to save each page's changes separately, I didn't think that the A17's UI would work differently. It also didn't help that the manual really doesn't cover dual-radio operation.

Figure 4: AP Manager System tab
(click on the image for a larger view)

Other sources of confusion were how different tabs sprouted depending on selections made on other tabs - selecting WPA adds a WPA / RADIUS tab, for instance, and the addition of a separate entry in the AP Manager's left hand panel for the second radio (Figure 5). I didn't really care for how this new entry interacted with the tabs and radio selection (Card Config Type), especially the automatic collapsing of the left-hand pane's device tree and tab view changes.

Figure 5: AP Manager Wireless tab (click on the image for a larger view)	Figure 6: AP Manager Encryption tab (click on the image for a larger view)
Figure 7: AP Manager RADIUS/WPA tab (click on the image for a larger view)	Figure 8: AP Manager Mode tab (click on the image for a larger view)

But as I explored the interface, I found most of the controls you'll need are present, with a few exceptions:

You can't control the transmit power of either radio, which I think is essential for dual-radio / dual-band applications Turbo mode isn't supported for 802.11a WDS point-to-point and point-to-multipoint bridging is supported, but repeating isn't As with just about every other consumer wireless AP, you don't get wireless traffic statistics, but at least get a list of associated clients (and their signal level)