Signal strength for an ath5k access point

[crowbert]

Background:

I have an ath5k card in my home media server that I want to use as an access point. I had everything working with Madwifi, but that seemed to break with newer kernels, so I switched to ath5k. I found that for an unencrytped access point, Madwifi would let me configure everything with iwconfig, and then I could just run dhcpd on the device. With the ath5k drivers, I need to use hostapd to manage the device, which isn't a very big deal. I also noted that the gentoo network scripts don't use iw, so I have to explicitly tell them to use neither iwconfig nor wpa_supplicant.

My problem:

The network strength is horrible. I'm not sure how to configure it to increase the power so that devices on the other side of the room (let alone the other side of the house) can use it reliably. With Madwifi, the signal wasn't great, but was much better and more consistent than I see with ath5k.