What does the wifi quality bar stand for?

[Christoph Höger <choeger cs tu-berlin de>]

Hi,

I currently notice the wifi bar being very low for all open Networks on
my shiny new Thinkpad R61 (iwl4965), iwlist scanning tells me:

wlan0     Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 00:1E:BD:64:47:20
                    ESSID:"VPN/WEB"
                    Mode:Master
                    Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
                    Channel:1
                    Quality=65/100  Signal level=-68 dBm  Noise
level=-127 dBm
                    Encryption key:off
                    Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s
                              11 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s; 36
Mb/s
                              48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
                    Extra:tsf=00000018c5fbd821

while a connection attempt does that:

wlan0: associate with AP 00:1e:bd:64:47:20
wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:1e:bd:64:47:20 (capab=0x401 status=18 aid=0)
wlan0: AP denied association (code=18)
wlan0: associate with AP 00:1e:bd:64:47:20
wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:1e:bd:64:47:20 (capab=0x401 status=18 aid=0)
wlan0: AP denied association (code=18)
wlan0: associate with AP 00:1e:bd:64:47:20
wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:1e:bd:64:47:20 (capab=0x401 status=18 aid=0)
wlan0: AP denied association (code=18)
wlan0: association with AP 00:1e:bd:64:47:20 timed out

So is that NMs fault, showing incorrect status bars or does NM know
something iwlist does not show in "quality"?

And does someone know, why my wifi card won't associate with an AP about
5m away with 65% quality?

regards

Christoph

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