Chosen Solution
I’ve tried multiple working airport extreme cards. None are detected. Ran hardware tests card is never detected. Verified that all cables are fine and connected. This is one of the boards that has the ram slot issue. Currently running 10.5.8. It’s not detected in 10.4 either.
It sounds like a logic board problem. Can you find one of the USB wifi units to try? If that corrects the problem you can swap out the card cage which may correct your problem. Ralph