Howdy all,

Having some trouble in slackware64-14.2 running a 'Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)' wireless adapter.

The adapter seems to work fine at home, it also can detect and connect to my work's guest wifi, though it stopped being able to connect to a partner network it previously could connect to (may be something admin side to that, though, I don't think I'm supposed to be able to connect to it.)

I've tried different drivers, all of which seem to work the same, except broadcom-sta makes the interface eth1 instead of wlan0. Everytime I'm unable to detect the target network in scans (using iwslist as well as nm-applet.)

When I inspected the network on my mac, I can see that the many iterations of the target network are on high channels (52, 36, 161, etc.) Note that the only guest networks (there are many) I can detect are ones broadcasting on channels below 11.

In my reading I've seen some indication that channels above 11 are supposedly restricted in many places. I've also seen threads that seem to implicate that people with newer kernels are experiencing the problem of not being able to detect networks that are on channels above 11. One arch user mentioned being able to change a setting with systemctl that allowed them to scan for a network on channel 12 that they previously could not find, but they didn't indicate what that setting was.

Is there any way I can force my system to allow me to see these high-channel wireless networks?

Thanks in advance,
Talos

What WLAN standarts does the Broadcom WIFI network chip support?

It looks like the BCM4313 is 2.4GHz only, so you'll only ever be able to access channels 1 to 14.

Within the 2.4GHz band, channels 12, 13 and 14 cannot be used legally in the USA. Channel 14 cannot be used legally in Europe. And so on [1]. To setup the device and driver for the legal framework in your territory, you can put this in your /etc/rc.d/rc.local

where XX is your territory's two letter code. But this doesn't always work. Some devices and some drivers ignore it, because it would allow you to circumvent the legal restrictions if you lied about your territory, or because they are cheap and lazy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the input. I thought it might be something like that, but I wasn't quite sure how to check. Looks like my solution is going to be purchasing a more robust wifi adapter, which I suspected from the outset. I appreciate the confirmation! Marking this solved as it is a hardware limitation issue with an easy fix.

I am certain there is a more elegant way to do this, but I like to use this script to set regulatory domains for my wireless NIC:

You can add this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local, wicd, and network manager.

To use it with network manager see this post:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...5/#post5452473

Bear in mind that the old 2.4 GHz adapters generally have a better range than the 5 GHz adapters. Alfa adapters come with high dBi antennas to compensate for this. Prices are a touch on the high side but the adapters get favourable reviews.

If you are using wpa_supplicant, add this to wpa_supplicant.conf

country=XX

The same 2 letter country code as 55020 refers to above.

No, it's not mentioned in the man page, but is mentioned at http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Do...pa_supplicant/ in the well commented configuration file link