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Date:      Thu, 9 Aug 2012 20:42:51 +0200
From:      Jakob Pedersen <jakobp78@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-drivers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Driver problem ral0 signal strength rt61pci/rt2561s chipset
Message-ID:  <CAEKTEhSVu7Wsgi4%2BCCBCzBbksthKwNuOvPQ%2Bq7BFY4eRxKg%2BJQ@mail.gmail.com>

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Dear all,

Firstly, please accept my apologies in advance if I am posting in the wrong
place but hope to get some help with this: I have a laptop, cheap oldish
Packard Bell EasyNote R1926, on which I would like to run FreeBSD. To get
to the point: Except for minor acpi issues I can live with, everything works
and runs well, with the exception of the build-in wifi card. It's being
detected and can be used, yet moved about 4 metres away from the router
signal disappears. It appears as if some gain settings for the hardware
have not been set correctly. When laptop is placed just next to router the
signal is measured to 70%, which is -54 dB; when moving away from the
router the signal gradually drops and is lost at about -95 dB. The same
laptop using the linux driver rt2x00 (which works perfectly) shows -20 dBm
just next to the router and -70dBm, where FreeBSD is losing connection
(same numbers using wifi usb-dongle with OpenBSD from same laptop).
The wifi chipset is RaLink RT61PCI (old name) aka RT2561s which is supposed to
be supported by the ral driver.

The behavior of the ral driver on this laptop is the same for PCBSD 9,
OpenBSD 5.1 and DragonFlyBSD 3.1, so it doesn't come across as OS-dependent
issue

My assumption now is that this could be caused by gain settings in the
driver. I have been trying to compare the source code for the linux
rt2x00 driver and the ral driver, but nothing really seems obvious to
me as
relating to gain settings; I was hoping I could tweak and re-compile the
ral driver, to make it work as good as the linux driver and have
well-functioning BSD laptop. So finally my question: Is my assumption above
likely to be correct, that this is a driver related issue? In this case I
hope someone would have some tips to fix this, or at least point me to
antenna/gain settings in the ral-driver source code.

Thanking in advance,

Jakob



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