Interestingly enough, I have had a very similar issue with my new Lenovo G510 laptop, with the same Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EG wireless card. It wouldn't find networks that were pretty strong, unless it was sitting right next to the access point. For a while I thought the solution was to take out the battery every so often and "hard reset" the hardware.
However, I found a thread with the same question, the effect of which was that the manufacturers of some of the laptops that use these cards
wired them wrong at the factory. If you look at the post here (props to James Croft):
http://
you'll see some pictures about it. Other people were having the same problem on different brand laptops:
http://
but the solution for all of them was to open up the laptop and switch the cables on the wifi card, such that the white wire connected to MAIN and the black wire connected to AUX.
Hope this helps, if you still haven't solved the issue.