playing with 802.11p / DMCA-86P2

[Adrian Chadd]

So Unex gave me a couple of their 802.11p NICs to play with.

http://www.unex.com.tw/product/dcma-86p2

It's a NIC specifically designed for the 5.9GHz band for 802.11p deployments.

Now, the NIC probes and detects fine under FreeBSD. The main issue is
the lack of regulatory information for said NIC. It's calibrated for
5.8-5.9GHz; it likely will work on other 5GHz channels but:

* there's lots of filtering on the front end of this thing, so it's
highly attenuated outside of the 11p frequencies;
* the power calibration curves for transmit power control are _only_
for 5.8/5.9GHz.

So to bring this up:

* I have to add a new SKU for this particular NIC, as it comes up as
regdomain/SKU 0x0 (ie, they didn't bother programming in one. Grr.)
* I have to add a new regulatory domain entry for it, specifically to
allow 5.8/5.9GHz operation.
* We have to figure out which regulatory domains these cards are
actually ok to use, and what the maximum transmit power is for each.

But if people want to tinker with 802.11p and have the relevant
licencing to do so, they will mostly work out of the box.



adrian