DSE XH7988 Bridge

Hi sorry to be asking but has anyone looked at the Dick Smith 11 Mbps Wireless Acces Point & Bridge ( XH7988 )
its only $147.00

LAN Standard: IEEE 802.3 for 10BASE-T
WLAN Standard: IEEE 802.11b
Output Power: +/-15dBm ~ +/-2dBm

Should I be buying one of these or working harder and longer to get a Dlink dwl-2000 instead. I would like to set up a node down here in Dunedin, soon to be Invercargill ..... So if you can tell me the why and why nots that would help, as I am new to all this. ops:

Thank you
hy-tek

Hello hy-tek. No apologies please - we are all learning! I can't help you specifically with the XH7988, but personally I would keep an eye out for an 802.11g device (54mbps compared to the 11mbps of the .11b). 11g equipment is not much more expensive now than 11b, and gives you a bit more headroom in bandwidth.
You may wish to consider whether the equipment you purchase has connectors for the antenna(s), or the antennas are permanently mounted. This has implications for adding external antennas - some people are happy modding devices to add antenna sockets, others don't want to touch the insides (hence the need for factory sockets).

Keep an eye on Pricespy for an idea on what prices are good.

Sometime the "brand names" are a better choice as the manufacturers tend to make updates available to address functional and compatibility issues.

Afaik, 802.11b and 802.11g seem to be about the same as far as signal strength to bandwidth ratio's go, in fact often it seems 802.11g needs a stronger signal to achieve the same bandwidth that 802.11b can do with a slightly weeker signal.
Of course, if you have a strong enough signal you can get more bandwidth out of 802.11g than 802.11b.
Just my thoughts.