best setup?

[GNUtoo]

hi,
I've been trying desperately to have a FLOSS wifi access point
I've started with FreeBSD and then switched to Gentoo as soon as there
was support for my ralink card in the kernel
Then ralink were not working well so I switched to b43
The responsiveness and the speed improved
but I still had :
*range problems
*responsiveness problems under huge load(such as rsync-ssh+(ssh session
or irc) )
*I often have to restart hostapd

so I bought 2 ath9k because:
*They are 100% free software: no firmware with bugs
*I was told there were the best cards for theses kind of things and I
believed it because the lead developer of hostap was hired by atheros.

so here's my previous setup:
b43 = 00:12.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce
One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10) (it worked better than
the newer proprietary one and that the free one)
kernel 2.6.29

With the following setup:
ath9k = 00:12.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR922X
Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
kernel 2.6.31

but the ath9k setup doesn't work well at all:
*the range is horible,unless I stand near the router it doesn't see the
essid
*I had to restart hostapd too frequently(several minutes of uptime)

I'd realy like to resolve theses issues.

I bet they are kernel related since the b43 setup doesn't work well
either with 2.6.31

ps: some days it works better than others

Denis.