AQL and the ath10k is *lovely*

no

however, I was just waiting for that question... :grinning:

If you can suggest a non-ct firmware for the 9980 (newer than the kavalo one here) I could use with a recent ath10k driver with openwrt, please let me know.

Note:
the kavalo firmware for the 9980 is 5 years old - last time I tried I had no end of issues (but there might have been other contributing factors)

I've "binwalked" 3 recent stock firmwares and the only folder that has something ath10k firmware like is
/lib/firmware/AR900B/hw.2
which looks like:

athwlan.bin
athwlan.codeswap.bin
boarddata_0.bin
boarddata_1.bin
boardData_AR900B_CUS238_5GMipiHigh_v2_004.bin
... (bunch more of "boardData_* files)
otp.bin
utf.bin
utf.codeswap.bin
waltest.codeswap.bin

I'm seem to recall asking about this several years ago and I suspect I'd have to "stitch" some of the .bin's together to get a working firmware. Given my lack of knowledge about the firmware, this likely would be a lengthy trial an error process that may yield no working firmware.

BEGIN EDIT
OT but for anyone else who might find this post later...
I had to use the "wayback machine" to call up

https://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath10k/firmware

which has this quote:

Firmware API 2

Embedding both firmware and otp images into same file firmware-2.bin. Firmware meta data provided through FW IE. Added in commit 1a222435a dated Sep 27 2013, for Linux 3.13.

END EDIT

Lastly, I did see a comment on the ddwrt forums about an updated firmware for the 9980 as recent as a few months ago - I haven't checked that yet mostly because I'd rather stick with firmware for which I can get support.