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For those of you struggling with the Atheros WLAN card and Archlinux distribution, i have a few hints.

The card i use shows up like this:
lspci | grep Atheros
01:0b.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5008 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

My current kernel version is 2.6.30. The software needed is wpa_supplicant. The most important thing is, make sure the athXk kernel module does not load (X is a number, currently its 9, and was 5 previously). To assure this modify your rc.conf and add MODULES=( ... !ath9k). The only modules that are loaded (lsmod | grep ath) are ath_pci, wlan, ath_rate_sample, and ath_hal. To check your setup use ifconfig -a, you should find a device called ath0. Bring it up using ifconfig ath0 up and do a iwlist ath0 scan to scan for accesspoints nearby. To connect to an accesspoint use iwconfig ath0 essid YourSSID and start your wpa_supplicant by issueing wpa_supplicant -B -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. If your accesspoint hands out IPs using dhcp use the command dhcpcd ath0 to get one.

An example of a wpa_supplicant.conf for a WPA secured network looks like follows:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
eapol_version=1
ap_scan=1
fast_reauth=1
network={
ssid="YourSSID"
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="YourPassphrase(plain ASCII)"
auth_alg=OPEN
}

That is basically all you need to do. To automate the process at boot up, edit your rc.local and add the lines:

ifconfig ath0 up
iwconfig ath0 essid YourSSID
wpa_supplicant -B -iath0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
dhcpcd ath0


That´s it.