Hi guys!
On my personal project & tests I found out that I'm going to need another radio in my router.
It would be really cheap and cool if a usb wifi adapter (even WiFi6e one if there is) could be plugged inside the usb port of openwrt router and recognized as a radio ?
I read this which seems to be a kmod working for ethernet to usb adapters.
Now I'm not sure if somebody knows how can we do that with usb wifi adater to be recognized as radio. I guess another kmod or maybe the alfa stage would be drivers + some code in rc.local for example.
Unfortunately I'm not that deep to implement it myself to OpenWrt yet, not to mention I've been all my life Windows type of programmer (.vbs lol) and web dev.
Any ideas of how's that doable ?
Edit: Seems that there are several successful attempts, but nobody says how exactly was done.
And also if the wifi dongle dual band then do people report 4 radios in total ? Hmm
There are reasons for avoiding USB WLAN cards for AP mode and/ or 24/7 operations, which are inherent to the form-factor and the vendor's feature design and -testing - these have been raised (including by me) often enough, so I won't repeat them again.
From a technical point of view, any WLAN card (PCI, PCIe, SSB, AMBA/ AXI, SDIO, etc.) will just work with OpenWrt (including luci integration) once their drivers are installed, if they are AP mode capable depends on the individual device/ firmware/ driver involved (and if they'll run stable enough would be an orthogonal question).
So to your question, you can already do that, right now, no development needed - you 'just' need the right USB WLAN card for the job. Personally speaking from experience of years working with that, you don't want a USB card for this job though (performance, reliability and range are just not there - and sharing one 'good' onboard radio between multiple BSSIDs/ vAPs tends to produce better results). Then there are a couple of supported (and potentially supportable) tri- and quad radio devices out there, often for rather reasonable prices.