Hello,
Ain't this wireless stuff real good fun, there is nothing better than banging your head against a brick wall. I have managed to get it to work, it was rather painless really. But there is a problem, its really slow. I'm getting really awful conection speeds from my samba server. I'm getting really long pings too. This is the output from iwconfig

eth0 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"Re" Nickname:"unknown"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.462GHz Access Point: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
Bit Rate=54Mb/s Tx-Power=0 dBm
RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
Link Quality:1/1 Signal level:-56 dBm Noise level:-200 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

I'm a bt worried about the noise level, other than that I don't really know. Anyone help?

Cheers,
Sniff

Why are you transmitting so little power?
0dm is 1 milliwatt (0.001watts). It should have an output of at least
16dBm (39mW). Some equipment will do 18dBm (63mW) or 20dBm (100mW).

-200 is much lower than -56dB. Note those are negative numbers.

-200dBm is far below what can actually be measured.

A typical access point has a senativity of -88dBm
It will work well with a received signal of -80dBm and
will drop lots of packets or not work at all with a signal of -95dBm

Hmmmm, I really should have noticed that. But I didn't, it was late mind. I guess that will solve my problem, will try and let you know.

Cheers!

Ok new little twist.
iwconfig eth0 txpower 15,18... etc
Gives error "Operation not Supported on Device" is there a way of forcing it? I don't believe it cannot be changed from 0.

Sniff

Don't think so.

You could try forcing it to use a lower speed and try different channels.

You could look if there is an newer version of the driver.

Hello,
Apparently my ap will be setting the txpower and its not really 0 at all, so its something else that is making the network so slow. I decided that I would try moving the computer further away from the ap. This might seem odd, but to start with they were about 5 feet appart, so my logic was that if I moved the computer 2 rooms away then if the signal was really week then it would not connect. I does connect ok but the network is still the same speed, about twice as fast as a average dailup connection. So should there be something else I should be looking for? Maybe change channels or something?

Sniff

Hello,
Changed to channel 6 and I'm now getting 1MB/s. Whats that like for a wireless G connection?

Piggyback:

I have the Belkin F5D6020, not sure which revision, though I would guess it is Ver. 2. It is an 802.11b PCMCIA card. I have been experiencing similar problems. I have used this card with Knoppix, and it works flawlessly, with downloads maxed out at the bandwidth limit set by the cable company. Recently, I put Gentoo on this laptop, and I have since noticed *severe* slowdowns. I have gone from 350K/s downloads to 15K/s downloads in a few days. The worst part is that my Gentoo laptop is not the only one affected. All other wirelessly connected computers get such slow connections that it takes ~2 minutes to view a webpage, if at all.

I have to imagine this has something to do with the way that the card is initialized. This is actually a cross-post (sorry) from a Gentoo forums post I made. I believe that the card got slow when I had it initialized automatically on boot. Previously, when I brought the card up by hand, I did not have these slowdowns.

Thanks.