Atheros-based card oddity

[Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko]

I have recently picked up Linksys WPC55AG Atheros-based card. With the
latest changes to the 'ath' driver it has been working quite well in
both WEP and non-secure environments. However, it had demonstrated some
odd behavior in somewhat nonstandard situation.

I have place where my AP (WEP, no SSID broadcast) has give or take same
signal strength as my neighbor's AP (no WEP, broadcasted SSID). As soon
as I come near that point, Atheros card would go into scanning mode (as
judged by visible lights and output caused by '80211debug state') and
never comes back out. Moving laptop closer to my AP and configuring card
down and up would bring it back to life and it would stay connected for
prolonged periods of time.

My Broadcom-based Belkin F5D7050 used with NDIS wrapper does not
demonstrate any such behavior. Atheros-based card works fine with
Windows on the same laptop and with FreeBSD 5.3 (mid-November) on the
different laptop.

I am running -current as of late December 16 (EST).

Output below illustrates properties of the place where problem occurs
(as reported by ndis-wrapped card).

# wicontrol ndis0 -l
2 stations:
ap[0]:
        netname (SSID):                 [ linksys ]
        BSSID:                          [ 00:12:17:01:d7:43 ]
        Channel:                        [ 6 ]
        Quality/Signal/Noise [signal]:  [ 83 / 83 / 0 ]
                                [dBm]:  [ 83 / -66 / -149 ]
        BSS Beacon Interval [msec]:     [ 0 ]
        Capinfo:                        [ ]
ap[1]:
        netname (SSID):                 [ XXXXXXXXXXX ]
        BSSID:                          [ XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX ]
        Channel:                        [ 11 ]
        Quality/Signal/Noise [signal]:  [ 84 / 84 / 0 ]
                                [dBm]:  [ 84 / -65 / -149 ]
        BSS Beacon Interval [msec]:     [ 0 ]
        Capinfo:                        [ WEP ]
#

I am not sure what additional info I can provide to troubleshoot this
problem, but if there is some or if there is a patch to test, I would be
glad to oblige (provided that my neighbor would not shut his AP down in
the meantime ;).

-- 
Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko (Олександр Коваленко)