Lion autoconnecting after sleep mode, lion autoconnecting after sleep mode

Question

It's really frustrating that my Mac 9/10 times won't reconnect after sleep mode.
Is there something I can download to fix this please.

Answer 1

This should be filed under "What Worked for Me".  For me this turned out to be a simple fix for a tough problem.  Maybe someone else can benefit from my experience so I'm dropping this into the forum to be searchable.
The short answer is to try putting your WiFi station on a low channel number. It fixed my reconnect problem permanently. I can only speculate about why this works, but it's easy to try.
Long version-  Fails to autoconnect after sleep, own station not listed in wifi dropdown list.
After almost a year of flawless reconnect, my iMac* suddenly began failing to reconnect or even list my SSID after waking from sleep. It showed everything else in the neighborhood, but my own station had been blacklisted somehow.
I could get a connection eventually, but it took 10 or 20 or more on/off cyles of the wifi radar symbol. It got to be very annoying. All the other computers including macs and PCs and ipads that visit my house had no problem. This included a MacBook with the same operating system (but a different wifi card).
I didn't write anything down at first so I'm not sure if it was triggered by an update. It might have started after some of my neighbors bought new routers.
I tried all the suggestions I could find on all the forums, including clearing the keys from key manager, clearing the preferred stations, etc. No luck. Sometimes it would reconnect immediately but the next time it could be very stubborn.
I knew I was getting closer to the snag when I read about 802.11d and country codes. I looked in the system log (kernel.log) with the console and found these lines repeated:
Mar 23 11:49:52 ZZZZZ-iMac kernel[0]: 72833.117059: performCountryCodeOperation: Not connected, scan in progress[0]
Mar 23 11:49:53 ZZZZZ-iMac kernel[0]: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'TW '.
Mar 23 11:49:53 ZZZZZ-iMac kernel[0]: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 56 60 64 149 153 157 161
I definitely do not live in 'TW '.
The number of times this message appeared exactly matched the number of retries that were necessary. The last entry would have my own country code (Finland) and a much longer list of supported channels:
3/25/13 3:10:21.000  kernel: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'FI '.
3/25/13 3:10:21.000  kernel: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128 132 136 140
There are three (illegal ?) routers in my neighborhood advertising TW as the country. (Taiwan maybe?) I discovered how to see the country codes from my neighbors' routers:
(Apple) -> About This Mac -> More info… -> System Report … -> Wi-Fi
Press the Wi-Fi label in the list on the left, not the one on the right-hand side that shows if you hit "Network".
I have an Airport Extreme dual band, and had the 2.4 Ghz on channel 13 and the 5 Ghz on channel 48, to stay clear of other channels in my neighborhood. I began to suspect that these channels may be overlooked or at least given last choice because they were not in the Supported Channels list for TW.
The behavior of protocol 802.11d is to scan for a country code from one of the nearby routers. The question is, what is the search order? You would think it would start with your own router, but maybe they were not on the list because the channels I picked are not valid in all areas. Or maybe it just starts on channel 1 and mine came in last at 13.
So I dropped the 2.4 Ghz channel to channel 2. Immediately the connection became 100% reliable.  My explanation could be bogus, but it has worked reliably all week, not a single failure, which means about 30 restarts from sleep, plus a lot of manually run on/off sleep/wake cycles. Before this fix, I could knock myself offline with just one on/off cycle.
Unanswered questions: This is a desktop machine, so why is it so worried that I may have moved to another country since the last session an hour ago? Why can't I set the country code manually?
p.s. Just as one last check I just now switched back to channel 13. It took 10 tries to connect. Back to channel 2, connected immediately.
*configuration info
iMac 21.5 inch mid 2011, OS X  Lion 10.7.5
WiFi Card Type AirPort Extreme (0x168C, 0x9A),
Firmware Version:  Atheros 9380: 4.0.67.5-P2P
Locale:          RoW     (?? Does this mean "Rest of World"? I think it should be ETSI, European something or other.)
Maybe this will work for somebody out there.
Jim