Automatically selecting channel

[Roy Badami]

The examples I recall seeing of wireless networking under Linux seem to
explicitly set the channel.

But I've just realized that my hostap client associates with my AP
just fine, even if I don't set the channel (indeed, even if I
explicitly set an incorrect channel).

Is this a standard feature of wi-fi under Linux that I'd missed, or is
this some special feature of hostap or perhaps of the way
wpa_supplicant probes for networks (I'm using WPA-PSK on my home AP;
haven't had a chance to see if I get the same behaviour on a non-WPA
AP).

Or has it never been necessary to set a channel in managed mode, and
I was just confused?

	-roy