Really poor range in AP mode

[Jouni Malinen]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 02:25:40PM -0700, Yan Seiner wrote:
> I am somewhat at a loss on how to proceed.   I have a hostap - driven 
> wifi card (linksys WCF12) which works OK, but its range is very poor. In 
> managed mode, the card has poor but acceptable range - say 10 -15', not 
> great, but OK for a handheld.  In AP mode, the range is really really 
> bad - it can be measured in feet, sometimes in inches.  Right now, I 
> have to have AP and client < 1' apart - even the width of a desktop will 
> cause the connection to fail.

This is the first time I've heard of such a difference in range. I don't
know whether the firmware would be doing something differently as far as
radio configuration is concerned between client and Host AP mode. Which
firmware version are you using? Are you setting any wireless parameters
with iwconfig/iwpriv? Do you have a wireless sniffer that would report
signal strength on the received frames? It could be useful to compare
the signal strength of the frames send by the device that is using Host
AP driver when in Host AP and client modes.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA