dkii
01-23-2004, 04:14 PM
I set up my first 802.11a link today, speeds are here http://forums.star-os.com/viewtopic.php?t=1549
I setup the AP side first, aimed the antenna to the tower 7.5 miles away. The next day, I sent the atheros equipment up the tower, had the climber aim the antenna in the direction I told him(used a compass and gps, placed a mark on the ground for him to aim at) Fired the equipment up, when I logged in, I was pleasantly suprised to see that my atheros card in client mode was already linked to the AP with a signal of -74. I was dreading this because of all of the trouble I've heard other people have aligning antennas. I had the climber adjust the antenna for a better signal, but -74 was the peak. (IIRC my FSL calc said it should be -68) Maybe today was just a good day, this was the first time we performed a major upgrade without any trouble at all(thanks to star-os) everything went perfectly. I'm still waiting for something to break, because things just don't work like their supposed to.
The backhaul traffic is still running across our 2.4ghz backhaul(which we left in place as a backup) so I did some experimenting with various ack, rate, frequency, and power settings. The main thing that really prevented me from doing much testing is the card in client mode. It seems to have a very difficult time establishing the first link to the AP. After the link is up, it seems to work well, but there were several times that it took upwards of 5 mins to re-establish the link after I activated changes. I also could only get a link on chan 149(maybe I was just impatient waiting for it to re-linkup). If there were some way to force the client to only scan on 1 channel, or even stay in the specified band(it was scanning b/g channels even though I had it set to A only) I think it would work alot better. There was also one instance on the AP side that I activated changes, and afterwards, the card mode was reported as "unknown" I tried changing modes, activating changes, etc... but could not get it out of this mode. A reboot solved it. The scanning problem is really my only beef with the atheros support. I'd like some more features, but I know those are on the way soon, other than that it seems to be working well. The signal isn't quite what I had calculated, but based on other's reports, I expected this.
Thanks Lonnie and Tony!
btw I have a screenshot of the mode unknown if you would like it, also this link/these units won't be in production use until monday if you(tony & lonnie) would like to experiment with them.
I setup the AP side first, aimed the antenna to the tower 7.5 miles away. The next day, I sent the atheros equipment up the tower, had the climber aim the antenna in the direction I told him(used a compass and gps, placed a mark on the ground for him to aim at) Fired the equipment up, when I logged in, I was pleasantly suprised to see that my atheros card in client mode was already linked to the AP with a signal of -74. I was dreading this because of all of the trouble I've heard other people have aligning antennas. I had the climber adjust the antenna for a better signal, but -74 was the peak. (IIRC my FSL calc said it should be -68) Maybe today was just a good day, this was the first time we performed a major upgrade without any trouble at all(thanks to star-os) everything went perfectly. I'm still waiting for something to break, because things just don't work like their supposed to.
The backhaul traffic is still running across our 2.4ghz backhaul(which we left in place as a backup) so I did some experimenting with various ack, rate, frequency, and power settings. The main thing that really prevented me from doing much testing is the card in client mode. It seems to have a very difficult time establishing the first link to the AP. After the link is up, it seems to work well, but there were several times that it took upwards of 5 mins to re-establish the link after I activated changes. I also could only get a link on chan 149(maybe I was just impatient waiting for it to re-linkup). If there were some way to force the client to only scan on 1 channel, or even stay in the specified band(it was scanning b/g channels even though I had it set to A only) I think it would work alot better. There was also one instance on the AP side that I activated changes, and afterwards, the card mode was reported as "unknown" I tried changing modes, activating changes, etc... but could not get it out of this mode. A reboot solved it. The scanning problem is really my only beef with the atheros support. I'd like some more features, but I know those are on the way soon, other than that it seems to be working well. The signal isn't quite what I had calculated, but based on other's reports, I expected this.
Thanks Lonnie and Tony!
btw I have a screenshot of the mode unknown if you would like it, also this link/these units won't be in production use until monday if you(tony & lonnie) would like to experiment with them.