Freebsd 7-stable on Asus Pro31j - wireless networking

[Mark Kirkwood]

I've recently obtained one of these laptops, and thought I'd try Freebsd 
on it. While the install went well and basic functionality is all 
present (install from cd works, boots ok afterwards, X works, ethernet 
re interface  works), there are a few niggles. I'll post about the 
others later, but my initial focus is wireless networking.

The card is an Intel 3945ABG detected as:

wpi0: <Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG> mem 0xfe1ff000-0xfe1fffff irq 17 
at device 0.0 on pci3
wpi0: Ethernet address: 00:1b:77:10:2e:af
wpi0: 11g rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps 6Mbps 9Mbps 12Mbps 18Mbps 
24Mbps 36Mbps 48Mbps 54Mbps

Doing a basic attempt at an ip address from about 1 metre away from a 
Linksys WAG54GV2 (unsecured access for now) results in a working 
association:

$ ifconfig wpi0 inet 192.168.1.65 netmask 255.255.255.0 ssid darkmatter
$ ifconfig wpi0
wpi0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
    ether 00:1b:77:10:2e:af
    inet 192.168.1.65 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
    media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (OFDM/9Mbps)
    status: associated
    ssid darkmatter channel 1 (2412 Mhz 11g) bssid 00:18:39:6a:73:ec
    authmode OPEN privacy OFF txpower 50 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60
    protmode CTS

... and quite good performance. However moving a very small distance 
away - the next room (say 5 metres) quickly results in performance so 
poor, it is unusable (timeouts and complaints from ftp sites about too 
may connections from my ip).

Now before scrubbing off that nasty os beginning with W that came with 
the laptop I tested wireless performance from several rooms away (say 
10+ metres), and it was acceptable (the purpose of this comment being to 
show that in theory, wireless access at greater ranges than I'm seeing 
now is possible!).

Are there any suggestions about how to improve range/performance? as I'm 
really enjoying using Freebsd on a laptop - just being a *little* 
further away from the access point would be great!

I'm running 7-STABLE from 28-02-2008.

Cheers

Mark