Can't get 5Ghz radio to show up in luci with a custom build for tp-link archer a7 v5

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I've been experimenting with building openwrt myself.

I got a second router (TP-Link Archer A7 v5) so that my IoT devices, printers, and legacy devices could connect using WPA2 on 2.4Ghz, and only have limited access to my main network. Wireless access to the main network is 5Ghz and WPA3 only, via a netgear r9000 running dd-wrt. If somebody cracks WPA2, they won't have unrestricted network access to the things I really care about.

home-network
home-network1561×1271 85 KB

When I first got the second router, I put DD-WRT on it. But it lacked any way to monitor it -- the r9000 has SNMP, which I use via zabbix. Also, if I rebooted the router, it would lose the custom certificate I had installed.

So I put openwrt on it, but that also had no SNMP. So I started learning about how to compile OpenWRT myself. Later I figured out that I could easily install SNMP on the stock image. Also, OpenWRT does not lose my custom certificate on reboot.

I got a third router identical to the second so I could further experiment with custom builds. I've managed to get it to build the latest stable branch, but all my custom builds only have the 5GHz radio in luci. For my purposes, I disable 5Ghz and enable 2.4Ghz.

I started with the config.buildinfo for ath79/generic, told it to only build the one target device, and then added a small amount of stuff.

What do I need to do so it has the 2.4Ghz radio?

I pasted a picture here and it said it uploaded, but I don't see it, so I hope it gets included.

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To be clear: I now have the stock image doing everything I need which I could not get working with DD-WRT. So there is no hurry to find a solution.

Now I am just tinkering, hoping that I don't annoy people here with my beginner questions.

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Actually, it's the 5Ghz radio that is missing, not the 2.4Ghz! I misread what it was saying about the channel numbers and thought what was there was for 5Ghz.

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Realizing it's the 5Ghz radio that doesn't show up, I think I can go ahead with using a custom build. But the missing radio is going to be a problem for others.

The next thing I am trying is to disable the other luci themes that I had enabled and seeing if maybe it's a theme problem. The UI looks very different in my custom builds than it does in the stock image.

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SOLVED! I did figure out the magic sauce.

The ath10k device was enabled, but it was a module. I set it to compile into the kernel, and that allowed it to see the 5ghz radio. I found a bunch of posts about people complaining that openwrt had switched to the -ct driver.

Once the ath10k-pci driver was found, the next problem was that it didn't have firmware for the device. I had to explicitly enable that firmware, and then the custom build worked properly.

At least I am able to actually build openwrt. Someone tried to help me with building dd-wrt, but I never did get that working.