Looking for recommendation: 802.11n/g/b USB Wireless Adapter

[sysconfig]

Hi guys,

Which 802.11n/g/b wireless USB adapter can you recommend for use with FreeBSD 10.1?
(Ideally one with external antennas.)

Cheers!

 

[diizzy]

Another option would be to use a wireless bridge device instead which also allows you to use 11ac .
//Danne

 

[Remington]

ASUS USB-N10 NANO, USB-N53 or USB-AC51. The AC series are little new and patches to the driver was made recently so can't comment on its stability. N53 has a little better range. N10 NANO is good for its size and you can leave it plugged in your laptop.

 

[sysconfig]

Asus N53? I've got that here, but I absolutely can't get it to work properly. I see only half of the networks I'm seeing in Linux (on the same box), most notably in FreeBSD I cannot see my own wireless router.
With Linux I can see the router, and my mobile phones and tablet have no problems either. Can firmly rule out signal strength as the issue.
Maybe I need to have another look at the configuration; must be missing something. I admit I haven't tried very hard yet, because it wasn't that important to have wireless on the desktop. If you are sure that it works, I at least know it's worth digging more. Thanks!

 

[sysconfig]

Thanks again Remington for specifically mentioning the exact same wireless USB stick that I've got here. Have done some more digging this weekend, and it turns out the reason why the card did see a lot of networks, but not my own, was that my own router was configured to use channel 12, but the N53 only scans on channels 1-11. ifconfig wlan0 list chan revealed that. D'oh!
Working beautifully now.

 

[Remington]

I didn't know N53 doesn't have channel 12. Glad you got it sorted out.

 

[tobik@]

Are you sure that this is not a misconfiguration? In North America 802.11 is restricted to 11 channels, but in most of the rest of the world 13 channels are allowed. It probably defaults to 11 channels.

Adding e.g. country DE (DE is for Germany, run ifconfig wlan0 list countries to get a list of valid country codes you can use) to ifconfig_wlan0 in /etc/rc.conf allows me to see all 13 channels.

I don't have the N53 but its spec does mention supporting 13 channels.

 

[sysconfig]

tobik, I think it might be a driver problem, actually. I'm not entirely clued up with wireless RFCs, so I may be wrong; if somebody could clarify, that would help.

I doesn't matter which country I set it to (it defaults to US with channels 1-11, and setting "ifconfig wlan0 country GB" (or DE respectively) will still only show 11 channels.
However, that same adapter worked fine on channel 12 from Linux and Windows on the same home network which was previously operating on channel 12, so the spec is correct. It's not a hardware limitation.

Also, the driver doesn't allow me to set a channel beyond 11 manually:

root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0 channel 11

root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0 channel 12
ifconfig: unknown/undefined channel number 12 flags 0x0

Switching my home network to channel 11 wasn't a big deal (once I figured out the problem), but if the "run" driver only supports 11 channels for this family of chipsets, I might need to file a bug report?

 

[tobik@]

Also, the driver doesn't allow me to set a channel beyond 11 manually

Same thing for me if the country isn't set properly. The country setting determines which channels are allowed, so this is expected.

Does it work if you run ifconfig wlan0 down first and then ifconfig wlan0 country GB?

 

[sysconfig]

Same thing for me if the country isn't set properly. The country setting determines which channels are allowed, so this is expected.

Does it work if you run ifconfig wlan0 down first and then ifconfig wlan0 country GB?

Nope, it doesn't, unfortunately.

By the way, setting country while interface is up, isn't allowed:

# ifconfig wlan0 country GB
ifconfig: SIOCS80211: Device busy

So here again, just to confirm that channel 12 and 13 are unavailable even in countries where they should be available...

root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0 down
root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0 country GB
root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0
wlan0: flags=8802<BROADCAST,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
   ether ac:22:0b:c7:49:69
   nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
   media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect (autoselect)
   status: no carrier
   ssid "" channel 1 (2412 MHz 11b)
   regdomain ETSI [B]country GB[/B] authmode WPA2/802.11i privacy OFF
   txpower 30 bmiss 7 scanvalid 60 wme
root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0 list chan
Channel  1 : 2412  MHz 11g  Channel  52 : 5260* MHz 11a  
Channel  2 : 2417  MHz 11g  Channel  56 : 5280* MHz 11a  
Channel  3 : 2422  MHz 11g  Channel  60 : 5300* MHz 11a  
Channel  4 : 2427  MHz 11g  Channel  64 : 5320* MHz 11a  
Channel  5 : 2432  MHz 11g  Channel 100 : 5500* MHz 11a  
Channel  6 : 2437  MHz 11g  Channel 104 : 5520* MHz 11a  
Channel  7 : 2442  MHz 11g  Channel 108 : 5540* MHz 11a  
Channel  8 : 2447  MHz 11g  Channel 112 : 5560* MHz 11a  
Channel  9 : 2452  MHz 11g  Channel 116 : 5580* MHz 11a  
Channel  10 : 2457  MHz 11g  Channel 120 : 5600* MHz 11a  
[B]Channel  11[/B] : 2462  MHz 11g  Channel 124 : 5620* MHz 11a  
[B]Channel  36[/B] : 5180  MHz 11a  Channel 128 : 5640* MHz 11a  
Channel  40 : 5200  MHz 11a  Channel 132 : 5660* MHz 11a  
Channel  44 : 5220  MHz 11a  Channel 136 : 5680* MHz 11a  
Channel  48 : 5240  MHz 11a  Channel 140 : 5700* MHz 11a  
root@monster:~ # ifconfig wlan0 channel 13
ifconfig: unknown/undefined channel number 13 flags 0x0

Seems the driver doesn't support it (we know the hardware does). I have tried DE instead of GB as well. Exactly the same result.

 

[Anil-G]

In case it helps someone I'm successfully using the Netcomm NP910N wireless USB using the Ralink 3070 chipset which works with the run(4) driver.

if_run_load="YES"

in /boot/loader.conf.
For further config information: http://pastebin.com/NCsYpzPn