Hello!

I'm not a very experienced user of forums; if I do something wrong (regarding rules), please tell me.

I've been trying to get my Linksys WRT54GL v 1.1 up and running with Kamikaze 7.09 (ran White Russian the last months flawlessly).

After some troubles it's finally working perfectly (read a lot of docs, faqs and all that).

But my girlfriend is rather concerned about radiation of WLAN. She wants me to reduce the txpower. White Russian was ok for her because I could do it there.

In Kamikaze this ability doesn't seem to be implemented yet. The docs (http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Kam … figuration) point out that only atheros cards' txpower can be altered.

I'd like to ask you, dear readers:

#) Is it true, that I can't reduce the txpower with Kamikaze? I tried to edit /etc/config/wireless and added the "option txpower" stanza. No effect (i.e. iwlist scan done with another computer finds the Router transmitting as intensively as before).

#) If it is not implemented yet, can be foreseen if this function will be implemented in future releases?

I'm aware of your efforts and appreciate your work. I'm also aware of the fact that it is not polite to ask persons who develop such great software in their sparetime to "finally implement this or that for us users." I don't want that, just want to know if this feature will be there. If I were a coder, I'd contribute, but unfortunately I'm only just able to set up a router and understand, what a vlan is ;-)

There might be distros which are more suitable for me, but I liked White Russian a lot and don't want to change to Tomato, DD-WRT or something similar.

Best regards

OpenJOE

If it interests you, after a while of using Tomato (I had a bunch of problems with Kamikaze 7.07 on WRT54GS v1.1 & v4 boxes, noticeably with the txpower, as french regulation towards transmission powers are a bit anal... namely 10 times less than in the US, though it might be quite a lot over there), I am now back to testing OpenWRT.

Compiling the latest SVN (rev 12993, as of today), and using 2.6.25 kernel with the open-source b43 driver, I can manage to tweak the "txpower", be it through "iwconfig wlan0 txpower NdBm" ("N" representing the "quantity" of dBm transmission power), or through the way it is suggested for Atheros cards in the documentation. "Signal level" on my laptop, through the use of "iwconfig" to see what I got, reports that "txpower" is effectively droping as it should.

Well, that being said, the driver seems to work without encryption and with WPA2/PSK (for what I tested... not much extensively I must confess), but the WLAN led doesn't work (it initially lights up, but is immediately shut, and then, the white and the orange leds on the linksys logo light up... though I do not know what this means)... other people are reporting that the connection hangs after a few MB being transfered (but as I said, I have not tested this extensively... so)...

If you wanted to give a try to this SVN, just to see for yourself, do not forget to add hostapd to the compiled firmware (or to install it after you flash your router)... though you will not need "nas" anymore.

I can't wait for things to get better with those damned broadcom chips, and I owe a big THANKS to everyone working towards the arrival of a free driver for those, and especially for this kind of arrival in OpenWRT ! Hope it will be usable in Kamikaze 8.10 (11? 12? Whatever : be it ready when it will... if i were a timed-releases maniac, I would not [ab]use Debian that much )... now, I am gonna try if virtual-SSID are yet something possible...

Back to using OpenWRT, the distro that may have given me the taste for terminals (along with LFS and Gentoo, now some years back)... and it feels good !

Hello Aefron,

thanks for your reply and your suggestions. They sound interesting!

Maybe I'll try that out one day, but not now because I had to get my WRT54GL up and running as quickly as possible without much delay. My private server needs the router, that's why I can't play around too much.

I wanted to give tomato a try, but because I liked White Russian so much I reconsidered and finally the White Russian (Nastrovie!) is back on the router again, working like a charme. I also like working on the console, that's why I like the OpenWRT-Project like you do.

Thanks again for your suggestions, I bookmarded them and will definitely give them a try when I want to give Kamikaze a second chance in the near future. I will need plenty of time for that.

Have a nice day!

OpenJOE