[Soekris] Soekris 5501 with Many Errors Using Metrix miniPCI 802.11

[Joel Jaeggli]

Randy Bush wrote:
> For our Tokyo apartment border device, I hacked together a Soekris 5501 
> with a large SATA hard drive, a Metrix CM9 802.11abg miniPCI card, and 
> FreeBSD 8-CURRENT. All worked well except the wireless was significantly 
> damaged due to very very frequent errors causing TCP back-off. It was 
> pretty useless. I spent a number of hours chasing it down, some with the 
> help of the FreeBSD Net mailing list and Sam Leffer in particular.
> 
> I attempted to better shield it.  A full description with pretty 
> pictures is at <http://rip.psg.com/~randy/5501-abg.html>.
> 
> Bottom line so far: hokey household supply shielding has not fixed the 
> problem.  I suspect the hard drive mounting over the miniPCI may be the 
> problem, but really do not know.
> 
> Help/clue still needed.

I can think of three things to try...

The diversity antenna connector may be part of the issue, you could
attach a second ufl cable that would probably shield the central pin
more effectively

Flip the hard-drive upside-down (the holes won't quite line-up height
wise and cooling will be an issue) but the heads and the servo will be
slightly further away from that side of the mini-pci slot of the card.

or one of these...

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/pa_mp2

which I used for the second radio in mine.

I ended up using 8GB CF even though I have a hdd bracket due to the lack
of sata adapter cables at the time...

> randy
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