To TunezNZ - have you tried other wifi cards, dongles, etc.? It could be either driver or hardware issue. In my case, an old Hawking dongle actually works most reliably.
Also ... I thought I had all this figured out till ... firmware 2.5. Since I upgraded, the connection seems much less reliable. It takes much longer to get an IP assigned by DHCP from the AP. Also when I ping various IP's to test the connection (signed in as root from the pineapple and as a client going through the pineapple), I get approximately 30-40% packet loss pinging google, yahoo, AND my own gateway. I'm in S. California, but 100-200msec response times from google and yahoo seems way too long. response time for my router @ 192.168.1.254 is about 30-40msec which is WAAAY too long. When I'm signed in directly to the router/AP, the response time is about 1-2msec. (My entire relay set-up is about 5 feet from the AP and I'm about 5 feet from AP and the pineapple.
It almost feels like my packets are getting lost and wondering around the inside of the pineapple. Some make it; some don't.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
PS Any other driver than nl80211 I can try?