Any wireless cards with this debug capability?

[George Nychis <gnychis@gmail.com>]

We are finding that under certain scenarios, various WiFi cards
(Atheros, Intel, ...) fail to decode incoming packets for certain
periods of time on the order of 5->20ms. We are trying to enable a
low-latency wireless link in which losses during this window break our
requirement. A retransmission would essentially be too late.

During this period, we are trying to determine the reason for loss.
Whether it is fading, improper tuning of AGC, failure to account for
frequency offset, etc. Ideally, what we would like to know is whether
the card *tried* to acquire the carrier and if so, where it failed. I
have noticed several Atheros kernel debug counters which show things
such as a PHY error, but it's not clear at what stage it failed.

Are there any firmwares or drivers paired with off the shelf 802.11
cards which would be good for trying to debug this?

Thanks!
George