Airport quality levels?

[Michel Lanners <mlan@cpu.lu>]

Hi all,

Tonight I successfully set up my Airport network under Linux on my
TiBook. I've used Benh's latest tree (today at 2.4.4-pre3), which has
the Airport driver hidden under 'Network devices', 'PCMCIA', 'Wireless',
'Hermes support'. Once I found it, it worked very well so far ;-)
Configuration is rather straight-forward with the wireless tools.

However, I get rather low signal quality readings:

pooh:~# iwconfig eth1
eth1      IEEE 802.11-DS  ESSID:deleted  Nickname:deleted
          Frequency:2.412GHz  Sensitivity:1/3  Mode:Managed  
          Access Point: some MAC
          Bit Rate=11Mb/s   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off   
          Encryption key:kidding?
          Power Management:off
          Link quality:31/92  Signal level:-67 dBm  Noise level:-98 dBm
                       ^^^^^               ^^^^
          Rx invalid nwid:0  invalid crypt:0  invalid misc:0

This is with the TiBook 1 to 1.5 meters away from the base station; it
hardly improves if I move them closer.

Anybody else got experiences with this stuff? What quality readings are
you getting? By the way, the readings are almost the same for 2 Mb/s.

On a related note, wireless tools as found in testing do their job, but
segfault on exit. Anyone else seen this? I've not yet tried to recompile
myself, or otherwise debug what's up.

Thanks, and cheers

Michel

PS Under MacOS, though I don't have a numeric value, I get maybe 70-80%
maximum quality, next to the base....

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