Since the newest betas of m0n0walll are running on FreeBSD 5.3, I
decided to buy an 802.11b/g Mini PCI card from netgate.com so I could
finally join the land of 54Mbps wireless.

However, nothing is going right for me and I'm wondering if someone
can offer some advice.

The new Mini PCI card got here today and I've been messing with it for
hours and hours.  The first thing I did was download the 1.2b7
m0n0wall firmware and upgrade my Soekris net4801.  After it was done,
I shut it down and unplugged everything.  I installed the new MiniPCI
card netgate and then powered it back up.

Since then, my wireless has been virtually unusable.  The signal
quality to my wireless stations is all over the place and they
frequently drop connection.  I can't even transfer the smallest of
files without a dropped connection.  When the transfer is actually
working, I get as much as 17Mbps according to the traffic graph, but
it doesn't last for more than 10 seconds before it drops to under
1Mbps, or drops connection completely.

I tried putting changing channels even though the channel I had been
using with my 802.11b MiniPCI card from netgate.com was working just
fine.

After spending literally my entire day on this problem, I finally gave
up and put my old 802.11b card back in.  With my old card back in, I
decided to keep the beta firmware on the system.  But I quickly
changed my mind on that because I noticed file transfers were only
900Kbps.  But at least they were sustained.  No drop outs.

But since I was getting 5x that before, I decided to downgrade the
firmware back to 1.11.  Now, with my old 802.11b card back in and with
the 1.11 m0n0wall system, my wireless connections are again rock solid
and I'm able to sustain a 5.5Mbps file transfer indefinitely.  (Tested
with several large ISO images.)

So that's my story.  Can anyone help?  Suggestions?

Why is this 802.11g card so unstable?  It drops constantly.

Why is m0n0wall 1.2b7 only giving me 900Kbps with my old 802.11b card
when m0n0wall 1.11 gives me 5.5Mbps?