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ctrler

Member

From: Vila do Conde, Portugal

Registered: 2006-09-07

Posts: 15

Website

iwl3945 sensitivity problem = bad scan results

Hi.
I have an iwl3945 in my thinkpad X61s.
My problem is that when I scan for wireless networks in windows I get much more results than in Linux. In linux the wireless networks that have low signal simply don't show up so it leads me to believe that the driver in linux is not as sensitive as it should be.
By the way, this was also happening in Ubuntu (9.04 and 9.10).
One of the consequences is that in my university, sometimes I can connect with windows and not with linux because linux I can't "see" the wireless network when it does a scan.
I suspect one of the problems is that there is some internal powersaving done by the wireless nic itself, that throtles the sensitivity down when not connected and this affects the scanning resultes.
It can also be that I'm doing something wrong when connecting to the network, I normaly do:

# wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -D wext -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/net-feup.conf -B
# dhcpcd wlan0 -t 0

then I check the status of the connection with wpa_cli (using status, scan and scan_results)

I also use iwlist wlan0 scan to get scan results.

I know that the powersaving options have been disables in the latest kernels (> 2.6.31) I think, so I should be using the wireless card in full power.

With WICD I have the same problems with scanning and connecting.

I'm using kernel 2.6.32-ARCH and wpa_supplicant v0.6.9 . Testing repositorie enabled.

Any help or sugestions?

Thanks.

ctrler

Member

From: Vila do Conde, Portugal

Registered: 2006-09-07

Posts: 15

Website

Re: iwl3945 sensitivity problem = bad scan results

Well, I even installed compat-wireless from the source in www.intellinuxwireless.org but I still have the same problem.