I picked up a Cisco Aironet 1200 series wireless access point (AIR-AP1232AG-A-K9) on eBay, last week.  I named it orthogonality, for obvious reasons.  My NETGEAR WAG302 just didn't cut it anymore (it wasn't too stable).  The performance with this thing is like night and day:

My IBM T42 via 802.11a:

Actually, I think half of the problem with the T42 is crappy Atheros chipset/drivers.  Here's my Eee PC via 802.11g:

The configuration is pretty straight-forward (erm, you have to be at least vaguely familiar with Cisco IOS).  The only thing that threw me for a loop was the guest-mode option for each SSID.  This option, in fact, enables the SSID name to be attached to each beacon frame sent from the access point.  It's off by default, which seems odd for IOS, since traditionally a non-broadcast SSID is thought by some to provide some sort of security through obscurity, and IOS has always seemed like an "insecure by default" operating system.  Maybe it's just me.  Here's what I'm talking about:

!
dot11 ssid AHiddenSSID
   authentication open 
   authentication key-management wpa
   wpa-psk ascii 7 04680E502532434987B324324B43290C7221217C0720370108
!
dot11 ssid ABroadcastSSID
   authentication open 
   authentication key-management wpa
   guest-mode
   wpa-psk ascii 7 3495834759835749875985785D2B0D2F3D2B200530761C0F02
!

Now, I need to do some exploring into the 802.11 MIB, and make some better graphs…

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