Sabrent high-power wireless USB adapter review

I live in an area that for a lack of a better word is like living in a hole. Although I live in a city I cannot receive any signals for my lap top or other computers where I am. Not that I am trying to steal a wireless signal, but in a pinch an open wireless connection can be a life saver when my connection goes down.

So not knowing a lot about wireless boosters and not wanting to spend much money I began reading post and reviews pricing wireless boosters. I finally went with a Sabrent NT-WGHU High-Power 1000mw Wireless USB 802.11g   It was cheap and it seemed as if it would fit all my needs. After getting the adapter I plugged it in and installed the drivers on my Windows 7 machine. The drivers installed and I could immediately see several wireless connections.

Next I tried it on my laptop as this would most likely be what I use it most with. Once again the adapter installed flawlessly with my older Toshiba Satellite and Windows XP. 

Since I am going to college and taking a Linux class I decided to try it with a Backtrack 4 installation running with VMware. The box came with Backtrack 3 on a boot disk but I had Backtrack 4 already installed.

Linux recognized the device but when I tried to set it up into monitor mode I ran into problems. I finally solved it by doing the following commands. I sometimes have to do these command twice when I get a strange error "unknown error 132"  that I think has to do with my own setup VMware/Backtrack/Linux problem.

rmmod rtl8187

modprobe rtl8187

And then doing a "airmon-ng start"

As you can see this device uses an 8187 chip so it will work with war driving and backtrack if this is your thing. I was also able to do a deauth command at my own wireless setup and get a four way handshake. 

The one thing I find myself using this adapter for the most is for computers I own that don’t have a built in wireless adapter. Although this is not the reason why I bought this adapter it has proven very useful when needed as a quick wireless device where one is not built in.

All in all I am very happy with my purchase. It works with all the operating systems that I have and where I was unable to pick up any wireless connections before I can now see multiple connections.