I have a Mediatek MT7916AN plugged in via mini pcie (to NVMe adapter) to my small x86 pc running openwrt.
The device is working, i can create/make a SSIDs
I did not have any antennas for this chip so in order to test it i had to be standing beside the device.
I bought generic antennas from amazon, to extend the range but its worse than my old asus router. Going through the wall drops the speed from ~600mbps (standing beside the device) to 70mbps
I should be getting 800mbps+ since i also have a wifi 6e router provided by my ISP. All speedtests were done using fast.com and i can consistently get 500+ on the SSID by my ISP almost anywhere in my house
Is there specific antennas i need to get?
Could power be an issue since it plugged into an NVMe slot? (as per the page on AsiaRF i didnt consider this to be an issue)
Also i did not see any 160mhz when using a wifi analyzer app for this SSID
Adding a comment to follow, since I'm using the same chip.
I've got a similar setup, I got the antennas and connectors from AsiaRF but was having a lot of trouble with the drivers working on OpenWRT, until I saw the thread yesterday for the MT7916AN which finally accepted those drivers.
I just use generic 5ghz/2.4ghz antennas. Nothing special, range ain't great but I don't really care, I'm line of sight most of the time anyway. You could probably just get anything that works off ebay. This specifically is what I've been using for the last year or so.
I guess power could be an issue. Not really sure how to tell. I think the most likely failure mode of a power issue will it be falling off the pci bus. Check your dmesg and see if you see any error related to your card.
As for testing, don't use an actual remote server test. Use iperf3, just install it on your OpenWRT device, ssh into it and run it. Then run a iperf3 connection test from say your laptop. That will get you your performance between your device and your router.
I've gotten speeds of 1.4gbps being maybe 1 foot from my network card on a 160mhz channel. Though that falls off to maybe 800mbps as soon as you stand between your laptop and the router.
As a side note, you can test the 6ghz channels by setting OpenWRT to Canada. But don't do that because you aren't meeting regulator standards.
I understand you wondering.
While I was as thorough as I could be, originally, I skipped a beat when I looked at it again but I had to trust I had counted three before and just remember how I found the last one.
@elder_tinkerer@LilRedDog what about running something with three antenna ports using only one of the ports? Having only one antenna wired up. Is that OK or also a fry?
I wouldn't try that...
If there's only 1 radio power amplifier for all ports, you'll get at least a huge load mismatch. If there's one for every single port, you might easily destroy the not connected ones.
My question is: Why would anyone only use 1 antenna when there are more connectors?
Even if you don't destroy your hardware, you'll have less data streams.
This can cause reduced speed between the router/ap and the connected device(s).
Imagine you're setting up a Banana Rpi and you have only one antenna around and you don't want to wait for the rest to come in from AliExpress before trying things out.
As long as you don't enable wifi on the SBC, why not.
But if you're so eager to try wifi even without the correct (amount of) antenna, you might have ruined your hardware before the missing parts arrive at your home.
But that's totally up to you. I wouldn't try this on hardware where the loss of it really hurts.
Hi, is there any further progress with getting your AsiaRF AW7916 fully working? Is there a post I can check please? Im thinking to put one of these into a BPI R3, dont think it will work in the minipcie as that seems to be USB 2.0 only for LTE but there is an M2 PCIe on underside of board I could use with adapter.
You need three of 