I've got myself in the following situation lately. An old Sony Vaio laptop was having issues connecting to a WiFI network I've setup even though every other device didn't experience any issues connecting. So I enabled wireless debug on my AP and I saw... nothing. And it got me wondering, should I change the WiFi channel I was using, and.. boom that did the trick.
So now I wonder, is my understanding about SSID's and Beacon frames is correct...
According to my understanding the APs broadcast a Beacon frame in each channel separately. But how can I explain this, the Vaio laptop was able to see the beacon with the respective SSID name, but still unable to associate because apparently the channel was not supported. Is there a kind of special channel in WiFi networks where all beacons are broadcasted?