Inside View
Figures 4 and 5 are photos of the D-Link and Actiontec boards. Both are variations of what is probably an Entropic reference design and use the same components as the NETGEAR MCA1001, i.e. Entropic EN2210-BG2 c.Link Coaxial Network Controller, Entropic EN1010 RF Interace, Micrel KSZ8041NL 10/100 Ethernet PHY and Atmel ATMEGA168 AVR Microcontroller with 16 KB Flash, 1 KB RAM and 512 B EEPROM.
Figure 4: DXN-220 board
Note that the D-Link is the only design of the three to not have the Entropic EN1010 under an RF shield.
Figure 5: ECB2200 board
Administration
As noted above, the Actiontec adapter has no admin access and therefore nothing to tweak. This also means that you can't set it into "All Pass" mode if you want to jump through the hoops required to get MoCA to work on a coax system that has satellite TV on it.
D-Link's adapter, on the other hand, is just like NETGEAR's and can be put into "Config" mode. On a hunch, I did just that, then fired up the NETGEAR MoCA utility that still was installed on one of my systems. Sure enough, it recognized the DXN-220 just fine and even allowed me to change settings.
The two utilities are organized a bit differently. But they both access the same configuration settings and display the same status information. Figure 6 is a screenshot of the D-Link utility's Setup page. See the NETGEAR review is you want a walk-through of the other settings and status screens.
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