Hi,
Thanks for the information. At least now I have some background
to work on - I already have several rt73 USB dongles, some notebooks with Atheros, some OpenMokos (which have atheros chipsets) and a few Nokia N810 tablets (which have a prism chipset).
although the Openmoko Freerunner has an Atheros chip inside it does not use the madiwifi driver (this is the AR6001 mobile chip, in case you wonder).
And they mentioned about some intermediate mode, called
Pseudo-IBSS or AHdemo mode, which allows a device to set a static BSSID and it is supported by some drivers. I suppose we are talking about the same thing here, just not giving any names (?).
AHdemo is not the same as setting the BSSID in ad-hoc mode manually. As mentioned on the page you linked to the AHdemo mode does not send any beacons. Whereas the ad-hoc mode sends beacons with a fixed BSSID. Not sending beacons has certain side effects: - your network will appear being "invisible" (the normal network manager wont show it) - you have to manually configure the connection speed and other stuff as the usual autonegotiation is using the beacons for that - you will have collisions (might lead to decreased performance) - driver compat problems (only a few drivers support this mode)
Nevertheless, it will fix your cell split problem. :-)
When you mentioned your EEE PC, which uses an Atheros chipset,
did you also had to set a static BSSID to the same used in the mesh network you use?
I think EEE PC uses the madwifi driver?! If so you can set the BSSID statically.
Regards, Marek