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Possible Fix For Flacky WiFi

13K views 27 replies 14 participants last post by  Sir Tanon 
#1 ·
From the Homepage hit the menu icon in the Notification Bar and chose Settings on the pop up at the bottom of the screen

Choose Wireless & networks

Hit the Menu icon in the Notification Bar again and choose Advanced from the pop up at the bottom of the screen

Choose Regulatory Domain and set it for 14 channels

Choose Wi-Fi sleep Policy and choose Never (I believe this is the real culprit as we don't have Mobile Data to switch to)

Now you should be able to turn the WiFi off and back on and get it to hookup every time (I did it 6 times in a row so I';m fairly confident this is the fix)

Note to Devs: Perhaps there is a way to set this up automatically when you hack the firmware and it got overlooked

If this works for you (or not) leave a note in this thread please
 
#5 ·
Who knew there was another page in the WiFi settings, it certainly isn't apparent. I just stumbled across it and the little lightbulb above my head turned on ....

Oddly the only time I had problems was ti didn't hook up when I first turned it on today but after a reboot the WiFi came on and hasn't failed to come on again after I manually turned it off several times today.

My guess is somehow the Make settings to set the defaults on this page got lost or skipped over during one of the many reiterations the FW has gone through
 
#6 ·
still not 100% on mine .. i'm running kewlguys rom with randomblames addons .. i have a widget that turns wifi on and off for quick reseting , it worked a couple times great but its now back to normal with no connecting .. i do beat up my android OS alot installing / uninstalling and tinkering with it so it is almost time for a refresh (ICS i hope!!) ..
 
#10 ·
Or just use a WiFi Widget to control it manually which is how I'm doing it. I don't always want it shutting down the WiFi when it shuts off the screen or I put it in standby because it takes too long for it to reconnect which becomes annoying. But I still need a way to shut it off if I'm not near or don't need WiFi to save on the battery.
 
#8 ·
Yea, for that reason I only made the 14 channel selection, I did tell wifi not to sleep with the screen on. Many apps won't let that happen anyway. Between getting ready for Christmas and work, I haven't been able to fully check out how much difference it makes. The signal on my home wifi did seem a bit better after I did this the other night while I was still using my WPDN. It sometimes seems to vary between excellent and good normally, seemed to stay at the top after making the 14 channel switch, but further evaluation is necessary if things like work would stop getting in the way.
 
#11 ·
The REAL problem with the WiFi is the idiots that programmed the kernel used the wrong drivers and who know how outdated the 'binary blob' they used is as the chipset manufacturer (Ralink)has updated it recently

The proper driver for this device is the RT2870USB and Pandigital (Or the company they outsourced the code to) is using the RT2870STA driver code for mini PCIe (The device uses a RT3070L chip BTW which is a newer part of the 2870 family) Sure it kinda works ... but it kinda doesn't which is why they came up with the special USB driver code. My guess is it doesn't always go into scan mode properly due to the difference in interfaces (USB vs Mini PCIe)

If they would only cough up the kernel sources we could probably have this fixed FOR THEM FOR FREE in a couple of days .... Even I could do it and I'm not a programmer by any stretch but I have built a couple of compiled from scratch Gentoo systems so compiling in a new driver wouldn't be much of a deal **IF** I had the source code so I wouldn't have to completely reinvent the wheel (Write new kernel source code from scratch)

I wish these Corporations would get it through their thick skulls that the GPL works both ways and they'd get a big advantage by using our fixes with no cost to them because the GPL says we'd have to give up the code to any changes we make .... In the long run it's all Upside and no Downside for them but it's hard to convince Management Pogues that don't actually understand the technology because it isn't part of the MBA program they took in college .....
 
#14 ·
I got this info from this thread:
http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/23789-wifi-testing/page__hl__automatic+wi-fi__st__40

Anyway edit init.rc to reflect this:
net.tcp.buffersize.default 4096,87380,256960,4096,16384,256960
net.tcp.buffersize.wifi 4095,87380,256960,4096,16384,256960

(I didn't change the others- as I don't think it's needed)
Instead of 30 seconds for wi-fi to connect on boot, it's more like 5-10 seconds now. I seem to have a twofold increase on browsing speed as well... no dropouts, everything seems to wok well.

some other wi-fi settings can be found in /etc/Wireless/RT2870STA/RT2870STA.dat

BTW can anyone recommend the best app to automagically connect to open networks?
 
#19 ·
You can give this a try. Untested by me. You can use this file to replace the one in KG flash or install it manually with Adb. Rename to ramdisk.img


adb push ramdisk.img data/misc
adb push fuse data/misc
adb shell
cd data/misc
./fuse ramdisk ramdisk.img
rm fuse
rm ramdisk.img
reboot


Ramdisk from SH20_OPDN_2_10_GAPPS_PD_INX7E_ENG_6410POP.zip
Modified with
setprop net.tcp.buffersize.default 4096,87380,110208,4096,16384,256960
setprop net.tcp.buffersize.wifi 4095,87380,110208,4096,16384,256960

http://www.mediafire.com/?dqvasv19uxm9imd

Rename to ramdisk.img
 
#24 ·
Well not sure if it made things worse, but it hasn't made wifi better as far as I can tell.

As for viruses and malware, I installed the AVG free product, and scan with it occasionally. Not sure if it helps, but I'm not really noticing some of your symptoms. Sounds like you could have picked up something that is messing up your WPDN, so you might give AVG or one of the other free antivirus apps a try.
 
#26 ·
WiFi troubles:

I have noticed that when my WiFi does not connect it seems to be mainly due to the fact that some piece of software is not reading the MAC ADDRESS of the WiFi card.

Once we are able to read and write down the devices MAC ADDRESS is there any way to force the data into the correct data streams??

It is my understanding that the MAC ADDRESS is set at the modems factory.

David
 
#27 ·
I know this thread has been dead a while, but I thought it might be worth it to revisit the wifi issue. I had a few ideas as far as directions we might take.. if it's even really worth it at this point.

I think it is.. but that's just me.

I was poking around with my WPDN earlier, in a terminal, and got these pics.

Pic one is the result of an 'ifconfig' and an 'iwconfig' command. As you can see, ifconfig sees the lo interface, but iwconfig is showing it with no wireless extensions.

Pic two is the result of a 'service list' command. I don't know if there might be value in trying an 'insmod' command or similar to force a reload of the wifi service/extensions, but it seems like one possible approach.

Pic three is the result of a 'lsmod' command. I know I've seen discussions on here about the drivers in use - in this case, the rt3070 drivers - and how they're not quite the correct ones for this adapter. I also remember seeing discussion regarding which ones ARE the best. I wonder how difficult it would be to either 1) Copy the correct ones to the internal SD card and run either a depmod or insmod to insert them into the kernel, or simply delete/rename the 'bad' drivers and then copy the 'good' ones to the SD card and rename them to look like the rt3070 drivers.

..any thoughts?
 
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