As the Sandisk SD WiFi cards are sold out everywhere (unless you want to pay a premium price), I've been experimenting with Bluetooth ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
as a connectivity option on the Tapwave Zodiac.
I have a D-Link DBT-120(rev. B4) Bluetooth dongle that, as with all Bluetooth dongles, comes with drivers from Widcomm (now Broadcom). To allow the Zodiac or any other device to access the internet via the Bluetooth dongle, all you need to do is enable Internet Connection Sharing in WinXP on your primary LAN connection, then enable Network Access for Bluetooth devices in the Widcomm drivers. Easy enough, well-documented on the net, and when it works, it works well.
But it doesn't work very often.
If you follow forum postings on the net, you'll see dozens of posts from users complaining about 'timeout' problems and other connection errors. I too was getting a timeout error on the Zodiac, specifically:Error: Serial: timed out. could be bad cable or faulty Modem, (0×0305).
I found I could reproduce the problem 100% of the time. When the Zodiac first attempts to connect via Network Access, a balloon tip will appear above the system tray:
Clicking that balloon will open a dialog box, asking for authorization for that device:
If you click OK in the auth dialog without ticking the 'Always allow...' checkbox, the connection will work fine. However, if you tick the 'Always allow...' checkbox, all subsequent connection attempts will fail, even if you reboot the machine and reset the Zodiac. And if you have to manually approve every connection attempt at the server, well, that makes a wireless connection pretty darned inconvenient, doesn't it?
I believe this is a bug in Widcomm's device pairing, as I could sometimes fix this by manually un-pairing and re-pairing the device. Of course, this bug isn't mentioned anywhere on D-Link's support site, and Widcomm will not deal with end-users directly.
Looks like its time to scoot my chair over to the Linux box again…
Today I found out that this problem does NOT happen with a Kensington dongle using the same Widcomm software. A D-Link-specific issue?
Nah, the bug still happens on the Kensington.
