Atheros problems

Hi everyone (hope this is the right list to send this to),
I am having various problems with the ath(4) driver. The first problem 
I noted was that the card was unable to run at full speed (54 Mbps). I 
first though that the problem was that the access point couldn't handle 
both the 11g client and my 11b laptop. However, I put my laptop to 
sleep and had the same problem. Further, a third machine on the network 
(11g) works fine and reports that it is connected at 54 Mbps.

Before I go on I should add that the access point is about 5 meters 
from the computer having problems. With my 11b equipped laptop 
mentioned above I can be outside the house, 80 m (250 feet or so) away, 
and still have OK signal strength. According to wicontrol(8), the 
signal is not terrible, the noise is fine but the quality is worse:
	# wicontrol ath0
	...
	Comms quality/signal/noise:             [ 0 97 0 ]
	...

The "errors" I get when connecting to a network is something like:
	ath_rate_ctl: 54M -> 48M (0 ok, 6 err, 6 retr)
	ath_rate_ctl: 48M -> 36M (0 ok, 3 err, 3 retr)
	...
	ath_rate_ctl: 11M -> 9M (7 ok, 9 err, 15 retr)
	ath_rate_ctl: 9M -> 6M (1 ok, 17 err, 18 retr)
	ath_rate_ctl: 6M -> 5M (3 ok, 10 err, 13 retr)
	ath_rate_ctl: 5M -> 2M (14 ok, 3 err, 15 retr)

After a little while it seem to remain quite stable at 1 or 2 Mbps. 
However, whenever any kind of network activity occurs, there will be a 
lot of "ath_start: out of xmit buffers" (am I supposed to do some kind 
of tuning?). Sometimes the connections will come alive again, and 
sometimes they will simply be dropped. I will also see a lot of "short 
packet 14" errors:
	# dmesg | grep -c "ath_rx_proc: short packet 14"	
	896

No other equipment is complaining, and I don't think there is any kind 
of bad equipment emitting crap packets or anything like that. There is 
no packet loss or low speed transfers between the other hosts on the 
network, and not a single kind of weirdness is reported on them either.

But, not only do I have short packets, I also have long ones. :) I am 
getting reports that there are oversized frames:
	ath0: discard oversize frame (ether type 7dc flags 3 len 2026 > max 
1514)
	ath0: discard oversize frame (ether type 800 flags 3 len 2018 > max 
1514)
	ath0: discard oversize frame (ether type f3b0 flags 3 len 2018 > max 
1514)
	
All the output and the attached files are captured/downloaded over the 
network, so everything still "works". Sometimes the SSH session simply 
stops working, but it often comes to live again (and that is when I see 
a lot of whining about errors). Pretty often when scanning after a 
network (which happens many times/hour), it will simply scan by the 
right channel once, twice or more times before joining the network 
again. It will then always drop down to 11 Mbps, or less, before any 
successful data transmission can happen.

If more information can be helpful, please let me know.




If you want to email me, I can be reached at 
premovehand0crap3_at_student.vxu.se, with crap removed.