Wireless cards

[J. Altman]

Greetings...

uname -a
FreeBSD whisperer.chthonixia.net 8.0-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p2
#0: Sat May 15 11:47:55 EDT 2010
root at whisperer.chthonixia.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/WHISPERER  amd64

My Netgear WG311T, with an Atheros chipset, seems to be at its
end. The box is about thirty feet from the WAP, almost directly in
line through an open door:  

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
27 packets transmitted, 21 packets received, 22.2% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.811/9.526/35.551/8.051 ms

I see this:

 dmesg | grep "wlan0: link state changed to" | wc
       9      54     296

Where "up" or "down" follows "to" for a box with this uptime: up 2:04

Over several days, this can occur hundreds of times; and often,
ifconfig shows this: DS/1 Mbps or similar; then it will bounce back to
OFDM; bounce around between OFDM bandwidths: then eventually fall to
DS. This is suboptimal.

So: what are people using these days? The WG311T is old. I've had no
luck looking for a modern card using an Atheros chip. I don't care who
makes it; whether it's Atheros or not; nor if it is PCI or PCI-X. I
just want it to work. 

Thanks for any recommendations; and best regards,

Joe