OK, it sounds like a pretty tough nut to crack. I'm not sure if I can get a new card as it's kinda built into this laptop, or, maybe I'm wrong. Do you think I might be able to crack this thing open and put in a replacement device?
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help. I learned a little in the bargain so I won't call the adventure a total loss. Probably my best move is just to go back to openSUSE 10.3 with the bcm43xx driver. Or I might try blacklisting b43 and usng ndiswrapper. I've used it before with excellent results. Regards John ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Buesch <[email protected]> To: Larry Finger <[email protected]> Cc: John Mountcastle <[email protected]>; [email protected] Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 1:47:39 PM Subject: Re: I need some help stabaizing b43 for a 4306 On Monday 23 February 2009 18:36:12 Larry Finger wrote: > More food for thought: > > My BCM4306/2 in a Cardbus format has a maxpbg value that translates to 10 dBm. > It routinely transmits at 5-6 Mb/s in my normal setting. When I reprogrammed > the > SPROM to 20 dBm, it would start out at the above rate, then rapidly drop to 1 > Mb/s. It looked as if the radio was overheating. This has nothing to do with overheating, so let's reduce FUD a bit. ;) The attenuation is not linear. There's a certain threshold where it inverts. Let's explain it in simple numbers. Let's say the attenuation A is from 0-9. The actual power output O would looke something like this: A= 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 O= 0 1 2 3 4 4 3 2 1 0 This is true for broadcom cards and some atheros cards. So as we decrease attennuation, there's a point where output power is inverted. In this simple example we must not go below an A value of 5. The actual threshold is different for each device and you're pretty much likely hitting it. The control algorithm is unaware of this threshold and it will scale the attenuation down which results in lower power which will result in scaling down... So John, back to your problem. I think you're pretty much lost with it. Like thousands of other people (including me) are lost with crappy broadcom devices. I suggest you go and buy something sane instead. I cannot help you anymore with this. -- Greetings, Michael. _______________________________________________ Bcm43xx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/bcm43xx-dev
