# Linksys WMP600N PCI



## ekvz (Aug 21, 2020)

Hi,

i've already once been a FreeBSD user ages ago (around 3.x/4.x? in any case to long to accurately remember) but moved on to Debian and later Devuan. Anyways i've grown somewhat dissatisfied with the direction Linux has taken in recent years and so i got the idea to check if the grass was still greener in BSDland and installed 12.1-RELEASE to a old spare desktop i had sitting in the corner after playing around a bit in a VM.

So far, so good. Right now i am trying to get wifi running so i installed a Linksys WMP600 PCI (RT2860 based) card because that's what i had lying around (and because i need 5ghz). After a bit of fighting with the not so nice OEM desktop hardware i got the system and also FreeBSD (the ral driver picked it up) to recognize it.

The actual problem with all of this is that it doesn't seem to work correctly. After setting the regdomain and country (which seemed to work) i tried scanning for networks with:


```
ifconfig wlan0 up list scan
```

which also somewhat seems to work as repeatedly running ifconfig i can see the card hopping channels but it's not detecting any networks. A USB based 2.4ghz only wifi dongle supported by the run driver instantly detects 2 networks and my laptop is sitting just a couple cm away happily connected to my 5ghz network also. I've already tried to switch the antennas connected to the card but it didn't help and i am running out of ideas. The man page for the ral driver says it doesn't support the N extensions could this be the reason for it not detecting networks? I have no idea about the setup of the other networks in the area (basic consumer hardware is my best guess) but my 5ghz network uses a Linux based software AP (hostapd if that isn't obvious) running on the exact same model of Linksys PCI card (WMP600) with N extensions enabled.

I also noticed that during scanning the driver sometimes seemingly out of nowhere goes into a loop barking:


```
ral0: could not write to BBP through MCU
```

which can only be stopped by bringing the interface down. Bringing it back up later seems to cure it and the card continues hopping channels finding no networks after being instructed to scan.

Does anyone maybe have a suggestion for me what i could try to fix or at least diagnose the problem? The card itself should be fine as it ran in a Linux based system quite recently and didn't show any unexpected behaiviour.


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