Powering down an Atheros 5007 with madwifi drivers

[Michele]

Hello,

I have an Asus laptop with an Atheros 5007 wifi card that I run using madwifi.

Unfortunately the acpi script asus-wireless.sh in /etc/acpi which is
invoked when I press Fn+F2 does not work.
This script calls a function that looks for
/sys/class/net/ath0/device/power/state or
/sys/class/net/ath0/device/rf_kill however I have neither of these
files on my computer.
I am not using the asus-acpi module which has been deprecated in
favour of the asus-laptop module.

Googling I have found a script that brings the if down (ifdown ath0),
however running iwconfig it seems that the wireless lan card still
transmits power which is not what I want (I want to save as much power
as I can).

I tried to ask on the madwifi support list/irc channel but I was told
that this is not a problem of the madwifi driver but rather a problem
of Ubuntu.

In summary: any suggestions on how I can power down completely the
wireless lan?

Thanks in advance,

Michele