wpa_supplicant in base and in ports

Hi hackers@

I know there's been a lot of work in -current (and maybe some of this
has been MFC'd, not sure) regarding wlan stuff over the last year; this
is why I'm asking about this here.

As I'm having a few issues [1] with connecting reliably with wifi on
stable/13-n253168-46c09d766d26 amd64, do I stand a better chance of
solving them with either upgrading the os to -current or installing any
of

security/wpa_supplicant
security/wpa_supplicant-devel
security/wpa_supplicant29

instead of using the wpa_supplicant in base?

[1] it's using ath0 for wlan0. It's set up as a wireless client
with SYNCDHCP. /var/log/messages has this over and over:

Dec 21 18:25:41 REDACTED ntpd[18024]: error resolving pool
2.uk.pool.ntp.org: Name does not resolve (8)
Dec 21 18:26:10 REDACTED kernel: ath0: ath_edma_recv_tasklet:
sc_inreset_cnt > 0; skipping
Dec 21 18:26:48 REDACTED ntpd[18024]: error resolving pool
2.uk.pool.ntp.org: Name does not resolve (8)
Dec 21 18:27:52 REDACTED syslogd: last message repeated 1 times
Dec 21 18:28:57 REDACTED wpa_supplicant[43489]: Successfully initialized
wpa_supplicant
Dec 21 18:28:57 REDACTED wpa_supplicant[43489]: ioctl[SIOCS80211, op=20,
val=0, arg_len=7]: Invalid argument
Dec 21 18:28:57 REDACTED syslogd: last message repeated 1 times
Dec 21 18:28:57 REDACTED wpa_supplicant[43489]: ioctl[SIOCS80211,
op=103, val=0, arg_len=128]: Operation now in progress
Dec 21 18:28:57 REDACTED wpa_supplicant[43489]: wlan0:
CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-FAILED ret=-1 retry=1

until I restart wlan0 and wpa_supplicant 15 or so times, it eventually
synchs:

wlan0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu
1500
ether xx;xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
inet 192.168.1.71 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
groups: wlan
ssid REDACTED_5G channel 108 (5540 MHz 11a ht/40+) bssid yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy
regdomain ETSI country GB indoor ecm authmode WPA2/802.11i privacy ON
deftxkey UNDEF AES-CCM 2:128-bit AES-CCM 3:128-bit txpower 23 bmiss 7
mcastrate 6 mgmtrate 6 scanvalid 60 ampdulimit 64k ampdudensity 4
shortgi -uapsd wme burst roaming MANUAL

Once the connection is established, it's stable. But why won't it
connect post-reboot? and would upgrading the os to current or installing
the above-mentioned ports help?

tia,
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