Acer Aspire One built in wireless really 500mW?

[Duane Attaway]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Monty J. Harder wrote:

> Did you try
> *iwconfig wlan0 txpower auto
> *or
> *iwconfig wlan0 txpower fixed*
> the man page indicates that one of those would enable power control, but
> it's not 100% clear which.

I didn't know about that.  Interesting, auto resets it to 27dbm.

iwconfig wlan0 txpower 1 does this:

*snip!* *snip!*

           Bit Rate=12 Mb/s   Tx-Power=1 dBm

but the signal level shown on my router shows unchanged and that I have a 
huge advantage over all other laptops in the house.  Still appears to be 
500mW.  I believe many Atheros cards may do this with the newly released 
kernel.

I'm sure the madwifi drivers work the power setting properly, but I found 
this odd.  There was a posting lately on the lkml about an open source 
kernel HAL that would go out of its way to enforce local regulations in an 
attempt to encourage hardware developers to open up.  Intel did this with 
their open source drivers and they could be bypassed, but it took some 
hacking.  This is a hot radio!  I just want the option to turn it down 
some!