On Monday 05 June 2006 12:20, Mattias Nissler wrote: > On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 18:06 -0400, Tim Shepard wrote: > > In the middle of last month (May 2006) while running Debian sarge > > and linux-2.6.17-rc3 (or maybe -rc4) I was traveling and staying in > > a home that had an access point, and I discovered that it would > > barely work (if at all) from my bedroom there (about 10 or 15 > > meters away on the same floor), but would work just fine if I sat > > on the couch next to the access point. When anywhere other than > > within 2 or 3 meters of the access pont, the symptoms were much > > like what Mattias is describing. Within 2 or 3 meters from the > > access point, it would work very well. > > Well, tried that. I sat directly near the access point (1.5 meters > between the antennas). But that didn't change anything for me, same > problem as before. > > > The 15-inch PowerBook has two antennas, one on either side of the > > screen. I noticed that covering the left one with my hand would > > completely prevent it from working, while covering the right > > antenna with my hand never had any effect. > > Tried that but I'm not sure whether it had effect or not. At least no > strong correlation. Also note that the airport card in the powerbook has > only one antenna connector. This makes me doubt that you can actually > influence which antenna is used from within the driver. Maybe you just > blocked the antenna that was better positioned and the other one was > only getting an unusable signal.
Some people also confuse how two antennas are actually used. They are never used in parallel. You can always use only one antenna to send/receive. The bcm43xx driver defaults to selecting the "best" antenna for TX. That is the antenna, that received the last PLCP at best signal strength. This selection is done at firmware level in the bcm43xx. You can also force the usage of a specific antenna, but that does not really make sense. I never opened the powerbook, so I can't say how the antennas are connected. But if there is really only one antenna connected, it will always select this one, as that is the only one able to receive a good PLCP. -- Greetings Michael. _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
