Chosen Solution
I successfully replaced the digitizer and tried two new antennae with no success. I have researched solutions and tried them all, still with no success. Everything else works beautifully on the ipad. Just no wifi or bluetooth. Is my next step to look for and install a new logic board or is that overkill? Is there a wifi part that could be replaced aside from the wifi antenna? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Are you restoring it from a backup? If yes, try setting it up as a new ipad and see what happens.
There have been a ton of bad iPad 2 wifi antennas out there. My recommendation is to buy a new wifi antenna from a source other than ebay. If you swing into a local repair shop, they should have bunches of them for sale. Make sure you are connecting the antenna to the correct part. There are two connectors side by side that look very similar. Make sure you use the right one. After replacing the antenna and before screwing it in or sealing the iPad, turn on the iPad and make sure everything works. After that, power down the iPad, seal it back up and test again. I’d bet money on it being a bad antenna.
I’ve done this repair successfully on two iPads, an iPad 2 and an iPad Mini. I hit that same problem you are having. Then I tried reflowing the actual Wifi Chip. Not for too long. When all was put back together the Wifi connected perfectly and haven’t had any issues since. May work for you. I have had a couple other iPads that haven’t been successful with this method though. But worth a try.
My eBay seller was awesome. He sent me several wifi boards to test the wifi issue. All of them resulted in a Bluetooth connection with wifi greyed out. I finally came to the conclusion that it must be the logic board that was causing the problem. I purchased a 32GB wifi only board from my seller, and it works great now. Yes, this was an expensive solution, but the iPad was useless without wifi. I checked prices at various places to simply replace the iPad, but I had already replaced the digitizer once and the antenna twice on this one. It is what it is. Anyway, thanks to everyone for their great advice. I have learned a lot about iPads throughout my journey. That’s for sure.
