Problems with RaLink rt61pci/rt2561 wifi card

[Jakob Pedersen]

Hi everybody,

I hope somebody can help me debugging, what I would rather term as
strange behaviour by my wifi card: I am running PC-BSD 9 on a Packard-Bell
Easynote R1926. During install the driver for the wifi card is correctly
found as ral0, suggesting the card to be RT2561s which sounds correct to
me. It  works and connects to my wifi perfectly, but only when the laptop
is within 2 - 3 metres from the wifi router. Other wireless devices work
just fine all over my apartment, which means it's not an issue with the
router. I have had the same issues with the same driver under FreeBSD 8.2
as well; I have tried several linux distros and so far Arch linux running
the 3.0 linux kernel has the wifi card working (but no usb, but that's a
different story..sigh..).

Whenever the laptop with PC-BSD is just next to the router it works as it
is supposed to, i.e. expected speed and nothing suggesting major package
loss. What could cause this and what could I do to debug? I am having
problems with ACPI and thought that, that might have something to do with
it, but for now I am resting that theory. Error messages:

Dmesg:

This is an error relating to the card:

wlan0: Ethernet address: 00:10:60:af:74:32
ral0: need multicast update callback

- The 'need multicast update callback' is being repeated four times, both
when laptop is booted close to router or away from router. If of any help
the full dmesg is here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7820484/dmesg_packardBell-R1926.txt

Thanking for assistance in advance,

Jakob