Amped Wireless UA230 USB2.0 802.11ac WLAN adapter

Intro: The Amped Wireless UA230 is Amped’s latest high powered wifi USB adapter.  It has 20dBm output power, and a 3dBi external high gain antenna.

Setup:

It was pretty much plug and play on windows server 2012. I plugged it in and windows detected it as a Realtek RTL8811AU Wireless LAN 802.11ac USB 2.0 Network Adapter. No drivers are needed if it’s done that way.

After that I wanted to use it in my laptop and I installed drivers according to instructions and rebooted and then plugged in the adapter. It took a while to install the Amped UA230 driver and after a while windows 7 fell back to the same Realtek RTL8811AU driver instead. After that, however it did connect to a network effortlessly. Even faster than the built in one the laptop has. 

Test rig specs:

Specs of server : Intel i53570K/16GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600 RAM/Nvidia Geforce 650Ti/Samsung 840 120GB SSD/Windows Server 2012 Standard/Realtek GBE NIC

Specs of Client: HP2000-412NR/AMD E300/8GB DDR3 RAM/500GB SSHD/AMD RADEON 6310/Windows 7 x64 Home Premium/UA230

Airtight C75 AP performance:

5Ghz 802.11ac  Same room

Result: -32dBm Average: 12Mbytes/sec or 96Mbps

5Ghz 802.11anac 35 ft from ap thru 3 walls

Result: -52dBm Average: 10Mbytes/sec or 80Mbps

Aruba Networks RAP109 AP performance:

5Ghz 802.11an same room:

Result: -62dBm Average: 10Mbytes/sec or 80Mbps

2.4Ghz 802.11n

Result: UNABLE TO CONNECT DUE TO POSSIBLE CLIENT ADAPTER OR AP DIFFICULTIES

Amped Wireless RTA15 (configured as an AP) Performance:

5Ghz 802.11ac

Result: -52dBm Average: 10Mbytes/sec or 80Mbps

5Ghz 802.11an

Result: -52dBm Average: 10Mbytes/sec or 80Mbps

2.4Ghz 802.11n (20Mhz) same room

Result: -28dBm 8Mbytes/sec or 64Mbits/sec

5Ghz 802.11ac 35 ft from ap thru 3 walls

Result: -62dBm Average: 8Mbytes/sec or 64Mbps

Cisco Meraki Z1 router performance:

5Ghz 802.11an same room

Result: -45dBm Average: 12Mbytes/sec or 96Mbps

2.4Ghz 802.11n (20Mhz)

Result: -45dBm 5.80Mbytes/sec or 46Mbits/sec

Cisco Meraki MR12 AP performance:

2.4Ghz 802.11n (20Mhz) (ap located 36ft downstairs 4 walls+ staircase

Result: -64dBm 2Mbytes/sec or 16Mbits/sec

D-Link DAP2960 AP Performance:

5Ghz 802.11an (ap located 36ft downstairs 4 walls+ staircase

Result: -47dBm Average: 10Mbytes/sec or 80Mbps

2.4Ghz 802.11n (20Mhz)

Result: 4Mbytes/sec or 32Mbits/sec

Windows 10 quick setup notes:

Note: I did an in place upgrade form windows 7 to windows 10 technical preview on a seperate system to see if the adapter would work after I upgraded.    

I installed the driver downloaded from ampedwireless.com and windows 10 said it was successful. I rebooted and the driver installed fine, however I had the following error message:

That was not good. So I went to update the driver and used windows update to search for a new driver and it is now working with the following driver:

I get proper link rate 433Mbps as well. Seems to be working fine under that driver, however. 

Overall: 8/10
Recommended:Yes