cc the list The short answer is you cannot. You might modify b43 to increase that number, but your device might not last very long. The reason is that every Broadcom chip contains an SPROM that contains the maximum power to be sent to the radio, among other things. Assuming that Broadcom sacrificed a number of devices to learn a safe value, increasing the power might damage your chip. You might have one that can stand more power than most, but it might stand less. Are you willing to risk your hardware?
In b43, the MAC layer sends a power of 27 dBm to b43, but the driver reduces the value to maximum based on that chip's programming. The reduced number is what iwconfig reports. I have no idea what the Windows driver is doing, but I doubt that it is sending more than the SPROM max to the chip, no matter what it is reporting. Why does ndiswrapper get better results? First of all, ndiswrapper only converts the Windows system calls to the Linux equivalent. It is the Windows driver that does the work. Remember that Broadcom software personnel wrote that Windows driver with full access to the device specifications. The code in b43 was written from "specifications" deduced by disassembling Broadcom code. Any mistakes in the disassembly, or errors in the original Broadcom code that have since been corrected might hurt the performance of b43 on that device relative to the Windows driver. The performance of the Windows driver relative to b43 varies a lot depending on the particular chip you have. The BCM4306 chips are the worst - the BCM4311's are the best. What chip do you have? There are some differences between 2.6.27 and 2.6.28 in the behavior of the MAC layer. The newer code does much better at recovering from low signals. If you want the best, then you should use the kernel from the wireless-testing git tree. That code will not be in mainline until 2.6.29. Alternatively, you could use the code from compat-wireless. It is the same as the wireless-testing tree. Larry _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
