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Internal details
Figure 3 is a shot of the Vision's main board, which is an Atheros XSPAN-based design. It uses an Atheros AR7141 processor, with 16 MB of RAM, 8 MB of flash and Vitesse 7385 gigabit switch. Those of you looking for a draft 11n router that supports Jumbo Frames will be happy to know that the Vision does—up to 9K. Belkin doesn't officially support this feature, however, although they told me that they would "by the end of the year".
Figure 3: Inside view
Figure 4 shows the companion N1 Wireless Notebook Card (F5D8011 V3000) board. As I described in this article, there have actually been three versions of this card. The Version 3000 card shown below uses Ralink's RT2800-series chipset that includes an RT2860 Baseband / MAC and RT2820 2.4 GHz transceiver.
Figure 4: N1 Wireless Notebook Card board
It's interesting to note that this chipset supports both 2T2R (2 Transmit, 2 Receive) and 2T3R modes, but not the 3T3R mode used by the Atheros XSPAN radio in the Vision router.
Also worthy of note is that the V3000 version is the only version that is Wi-Fi 802.11n Draft 2.0 certified. The V3000 has just started to ship, so you might have a hard time finding it. Fortunately, the version number can be found on the serial # label on the outside of the product box.
User reviews
Average user rating from: 1 user(s)
good while it lasts
I bought this because I thought the screen was cool, I'm a sucker... After having it for an hour I realized it wasn't all that helpful, especially when I offload DHCP to a server vs. running it on the router, every host showed up as unknown. But that's not a problem with Belkin, it's a problem with all routers since the hostname is not stored in the DHCP database as that service is shut off, and shouldn't be a gripe on my part.
Anyway, hoping DD-WRT might do something cool with the screen I anxiously went there, but interest seemed to have fallen off and never went anywhere. Belkin does make their code available open source so if I was smart enough I could have done something with that.
On to the problems, after getting it I saw people were having trouble with IPSec. Luckily I was able to find a firmware on the Belkin UK site which solved that, strangely that firmware never appeared on the US site until a year later.
Things worked beyond great for a year, when one day it started the reboot of death. Reboot, get partially done, reboot again, repeat. Not knowing it had a lifetime warranty I bought the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH, then noticed it had the lifetime warranty. So I sent it back in....
When it came back to me I was surprised it was a brand new one, but I had already fallen in love with the Buffalo for it's speed and reliability, so I gave this brand new router to my brother instead. A month later he calls me and says, "hey, this thing you gave me is just rebooting over and over again, did you ever see that?" Lifetime warranty is great, but not if you're switching it out monthly.
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