Airport doesn't pick up wifi after hard drive switch.

Hi Leon,

It was deja vu all over again reading your problem since until 5 minutes ago I had the exact same issue. I tried opening the iMac back up, checking the airport card connection and even repaired the tears I had made in the shielding with aluminum tape all to no avail. I got it working again by doing something very odd that I read in a post somewhere about I think a MacBook Pro:

Try logging onto your airport with airport utility and take it off the "automatic channel" setting in favor of a specific channel (I happened to choose 6). For reasons I don't understand this fixed the problem for me and I hope it will do so for you, too!

-Bob

I bought a used iMac with the same issue. The previous owner had the hard drive replaced. I replace the card - exact same. So I was still puzzled and did a little experiment. I could never find any documentation on the two different antenna leads so switched the two antenna cables - PRESTO - works great.

I find to have the same issue as described by Leon.

Problem is, I tried to reopen my iMac, but it won't open the front bezel with the card trick..

So I opened it from the bottem and undid the EMI shield. It appears there's only one antenna attached to my airport card.

does anyone know if this is normal, or should it always have two antenna's?

Is there a way to fix this? Maybe by creating my own antenna somehow?

Thanks!