[ath9k-devel] Question about ath9k signal strength (AP mode)

[Benoit Papillault <benoit.papillault@free.fr>]

Le 11/07/2010 13:51, Peter Stuge a ?crit :
> Benoit Papillault wrote:
>>> I know the ath9k is under development, so my question is if this is
>>> known by the development team and therefor will be worked on?
>>
>> [ignoring other not very informative post...]
>
> Maybe not informative to you, but I wanted to prepare Lars a little
> for what to expect from this mailing list. I know that Felix and
> others are doing great work on ath9k and I'm very happy that he is
> more optimistic about the driver than I :) but in my experience,
> ath9k just does not give a very robust wifi experience and
> development speed is moderate, supposedly because of limited
> resources.
>
> Note that I am not really complaining much about that, only
> observing and informing.
>
>
>> Is there a way you can bisect between OpenWrt and dd-wrt? I have
>> AR5416, AR9160 and AR9280 myself, so I can test if you tell me what
>> version you used.
>
> dd-wrt was using madwifi according to the original post. No go for
> the bisect.

At least, we have a known working binary and a known not-working binary, 
so we can study the difference. If there are using different drivers, so 
we could try to narrow the difference between register settings.

It seems that every other driver is not handling TX power settings 
properly and I think this is quite a complex subject. For instance, I've 
seen that most hardware are using calibration data for TX power and 
there are calibration data for each TX rate as well, and such 
calibration might depends upon temperature. Atheros hardware also has 
per descriptor specific registers regarding TX power which can be 
enabled or disabled if I remember correctly.

Moreover, datasheet show different maximum TX power for each rate, which 
sounds a bit strange. If someone could shed some light on all this 
complex stuff?

Regards,
Benoit