On 11 Feb 2008, at 16:47, Andreas Schweigstill wrote: > The design of the "pseudo-Ethernet" W-LAN also doesn't allow proper > antenna diversity and transmit power setting because it is a broadcast > media and not timeslot based like GSM or DECT.
That sounds very plausible. So the diversity system only works if the low-level and high-level protocols combine to send enough retry attempts on failed packets, to compensate for when the wrong antenna is used for a given station. Not a very robust solution. Recently I bought an Atheros AR5008-based Mini-PCI Express card. It turns out that I can't use it yet because MadWiFi doesn't really support it: it works in Kismet, but it can't connect to my WPA network. But being an 802.11n-capable card, it claims to implement MIMO mode. Such cards have either two or three complete radio transceivers in them. The advertised benefit is that 802.11n MIMO mode enables very high speeds - up to 300 megabits over short distances - by exploiting spatial diversity (provided that both ends have MIMO cards). However, probably more useful than the speed increase, is the possibility that in the ordinary 802.11a/b/g modes such cards would be able to implement diversity properly, if the manufacturer has bothered to implement it properly in the firmware. - Martin. _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
