I just picked up the Atheros based Airlink AWLC4030 so I can use WPA and enable freeRadius - and of course use G rather than b for the speed boost. Another benefit was going to be running netapplet so I can easily take a look at APs - my current card wouldn’t run iwscan.

So once I got everything setup I installed netapplet and found that I would loose connection every few seconds and then it would come back up. At first I thought it might be a problem with the network monitor not registering properly or some such nonesense. But a quick download of the latest Short Attention Gamer podcast showed that it really was stopping every few seconds. Then I worried it was the card itself. It is, after all a 14.95 card.

But I turned off netapplet and everything was fine. So off to good I went and I came back with this thread.

Looks like the madwifi drivers for the Atheros chipset have issues running iwscan without dropping the connection for a brief amount of time.

I did try installing wifi-radar and that worked better because it only runs the scan when you open the applet to view the local APs. But then it did not appear to be correctly reporting the speed of the APs. They kept showing up as b.

Oh well. No big worries. If you’re having this problem I guess we just have to wait and see if madwifi can take care of it in upcoming releases.