dear mailing list,

i am experiencing issues w/ packetloss on a long range wireless ISP link. 

i get as low as 30% and as high as 60%. sometimes my syslog dumps strange TXEXC errors printing my HWADDR and the BSSID.

i read a mail suggesting lowering the maxrate to 5.5M. this did nothing. 

i also get a lot of TX excessive retries. 
root@dell:~# iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11b  ESSID:"Interlink3608"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.422GHz  Access Point: 00:02:2D:38:C8:6F
          Bit Rate=5.5Mb/s   Tx-Power=24 dBm   Sensitivity=1/3
          Retry min limit:8   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality:42/92  Signal level:-66 dBm  Noise level:-98 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
--->      Tx excessive retries:2620  Invalid misc:15852   Missed beacon:0

root@dell:~#
as you can see the signal level should be strong enough to get fair/good signal.

changing the output txpower rating does very little.

here is output from ping :
--- 208.179.226.1 ping statistics ---
499 packets transmitted, 266 packets received, 46% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3.6/34.7/352.1 ms

if there are any secret hacks or fine tuning i can do to reduce packet loss, please 
advise w/ any possible suggestions. so far my guess is this wireless ISP is designed to put an antenna on your roof,  im using a portable 8dbi patch. maybe my antenna too weak?

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