David Young wrote:

>The Atheros cards support AP mode. Get one of those. I have two dual-band
>D-Link DWL-AB520s that contain Atheros chips. They support .11a and .11b.
>They seem to work pretty well as access points. I think there is an AG520,
>also, supporting .11a/b/g. Beware of the .11b/g products, since some of
>them are Broadcom.
>  
>

Would I be happy with any of those cards if I'm really just looking to 
1) get rid of the wires at home and 2) use a PCMCIA version in my 
laptops whether I'm home or on the road in .11a/b/g world?

Wireless networking seems very volatile and I don't see that changing 
any time soon.  In less than a decade we've already got three 802.11 
flavors and vendors are constantly changing chipsets.  What will happen 
to the BSD wireless support when many vendors decide to stop using the 
Atheros chips and move on to something different and unsupported in BSD?

Linuxant (http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader) has an intriguing way to 
solve the wireless card support issue... use an NDIS 
compatibility-wrapper to utilize vendor supplied win32 drivers.  Of 
course, I only think this is a good idea because it seems so difficult 
to keep up with the ever-changing wireless industry that has little 
intention of meshing with non-MS operating systems.  It could allow 
people to use the latest and earliest cards before driver support exists 
for BSD.  Could some of you present reasons a WiFi NDIS wrapper would or 
would not be a good thing for NetBSD?

Thanks,
Mike.