In the old days of Madwifi, and with other wireless cards like the Prism 2,2.5,3 hostap supported cards, one did not have to worry about diversity.  The system took care of it.

But I just came scross a reference to a Wiki page on the madwifi site which says that for Atheros cards with only one of the two antenna connectors used you now MUST disable diversity or you will suffer packet loss.

The Wiki page can be found at http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/AntennaDiversity.

You can of course specify the diversity, and the rxantenna and txantenna in the wireless config file, the point of this note is a reminder that with the current madwifi code this is mandatory NOT optional if you only have one antenna attached to your wireless card. 

/lib/wifi/madwifi.sh seems to cope with the specification of diversity, rxtantenna and txantenna on atheros interface configs, but it does not set a default as far as I can tell.  The documentation does not seem to make mention of them (yes I did update to the latest svn).

David

That page is http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/AntennaDiversity (without the trailing dot)

In Kamikaze 7.09, the default in /lib/wifi/madwifi.sh appears to be diversity=1, with no defaults for rxantenna and txantenna, so I think the driver will choose 0 (auto). I guess this is better than having a default which nails it to one connector, as it may be the wrong one :-)