I had to do a similar thing with my T530. I wanted to upgrade to a WiFi 6+Bluetooth card. The built in Bluetooth adapter is very old, I think v4.2. It's also a finicky module with a mezzanine connector, and it's nestled deeply into the internal magnesium frame so the range is abysmal.
I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist, but I'm left with a bigger problem. The WiFi slot offers PCI, but not USB. The WWAN slot has USB, but not PCI.
I ended up tapping into the original Bluetooth connector to steal the USB lines and route them back to the PCI connector.
I had some issues at first with the device not enumerating reliably, but it eventually settled down.
Now I have WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5. Unfortunately the WiFi frontend is extremely bad (it's a Chinese knockoff) and I have pretty bad signal strength even literally on top of the router. But it works well enough and my Bluetooth headphones now work more than 10ft away from the machine.
The major problem is that the only WiFi 6 card available in mini PCIe is knockoff Intel AX210 cards. I suppose that's fair, mPCIe is basically obsolete these days. Unfortunately I don't have space for a M.2 or other adapter. Maybe I could build a custom express card
I reflashed the BIOS to kill the whitelist, but I'm left with a bigger problem. The WiFi slot offers PCI, but not USB. The WWAN slot has USB, but not PCI.
I ended up tapping into the original Bluetooth connector to steal the USB lines and route them back to the PCI connector.
I had some issues at first with the device not enumerating reliably, but it eventually settled down.
Now I have WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5. Unfortunately the WiFi frontend is extremely bad (it's a Chinese knockoff) and I have pretty bad signal strength even literally on top of the router. But it works well enough and my Bluetooth headphones now work more than 10ft away from the machine.
The major problem is that the only WiFi 6 card available in mini PCIe is knockoff Intel AX210 cards. I suppose that's fair, mPCIe is basically obsolete these days. Unfortunately I don't have space for a M.2 or other adapter. Maybe I could build a custom express card