DragonFlyBSD

I had some trouble configuring my ath0 device, as well. The DFLY docs are a little outdated, and there are some discrepancies here and there. You'll find the FreeBSD docs mildly helpful.

I'm running a Qualcomm Atheros AR9565.

To get mine working, I installed wpa_supplicant from ports, and appended some things to my /etc/rc.conf:
wpa_supplicant_program="/usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant"
wpa_supplicant_flags="-B -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf"
wlans_ath0="wlan0"
ifconfig_wlan0="wpa dhcp"

Note that I am not doing any sort of ifconfig_ath0. Don't forget to edit your /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf for your wifi networks. Currently, I have tested connecting to open and wpa2 networks.

Please modify your /etc/rc.conf (or manually execute the necessary commands) and then execute `service netif restart`. Then verify that you are still having connection issues.

For what it's worth after 6 years, I found a laptop with such a Wireless adapter :

ath0@pci0:1:0:0:        class=0x028000 card=0x410e144d chip=0x0032168c rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Qualcomm Atheros'
    device     = 'AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter'
    class      = network

It's working out of the box with the 6.0-RELEASE, but not with 5GHz networks (that was my mistake at the beginning).

The working rc.conf configuration is :

dhcpcd_enable="YES" 
ifconfig_wlan0="WPA" 

And for /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf I had to add the following lines

network={
        ssid="mynetwork" 
        scan_ssid=0
        psk="xxxx" 
        priority=5
}