Netgate 200mW card and hostap for power modification

Vikram KAUL vkaul
Tue Jan 3 13:52:29 PST 2006


I recently purchased a Netgate NL-2511CD PLUS EXT2
Long Range Wireless Card after reading it to have a 200 mW capability on 
SeattleWireless.net
http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/HardwareComparison

The link took me to this Prism2.5 based card
http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?products_id=43
which does point to hostap for linux support

Now, when I used
iwpriv wlan0 writemif 62 128

to configure HFA3861_CR_MANUAL_TX_POWER register (CR31) to its highest 
value (=128), I expected to get a confirmation of the configuration by 
iwconfig to show 23.1 dBm (=200 mW)

But it never goes above 100 mW (=20 dBm)

Additionally, the received power at a 'receiver' running iwspy to the card 
is about 25 dB weaker than a Linksys WCF12 CompactFlash using hostap and 
same commands to control power

Has anyone encountered these problems ?

Additional questions:
--------------------

1. Are there some studies on the correlation between CR31 (=Manual Tx 
Power Control) and CR58 (Measured Tx Power). Under what confitions, if any 
are they the same.

2. Is it possible that this is a firmware issue ? Is there a way to query 
the firmware to check the limits on power ?

Thanks in advance




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