Belkin Home Base

Belkin’s new Home Base can connect USB devices such as hard disks, printers and digital cameras to a wireless network so that they can be shared by everyone on the network.

The Home Base does not include a wireless router, so you will need to have your own wireless router and network already set up. The first time you set up the Home Base it does need to be connected to the router with an ordinary network cable.

However, it took us less than five minutes to install Belkin’s Control Centre software and to enter the password for our wireless network.

Once you have done this, unplug the network cable and move the Home Base to any convenient location in the home. It can also connect to your wireless network connection (it is compatible with all wireless networks including the latest 802.11n standard).

It is necessary to install the Control Centre software on each additional computer on the network, but this took a few moments on each of our computers. Afterwards the software runs automatically.

There are four USB ports on the back of the Home Base. We plugged in a USB memory key, digital camera and a printer, and were impressed to see that they all worked perfectly on our network.

The memory key and digital camera immediately appeared as network shares on the Windows PCs on the network, and as disk icons on the desktop of the Mac computers. We were even able to play a video clip from the memory key on both the Mac and the PC at the same time.

The printer worked without problems too – although it can obviously only print one document at a time. When you print a document the Control Centre program temporarily takes control of the printer until the document has been printed, and it then releases the printer so that it can be used by other people on the network once more.

The Home Base is on the expensive side compared with a standard USB hub but it does its job well.