Move a wifi network from one router to another

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
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I am planing to replace a TP Link router, running OpenWRT 18.x, with a more powerful model, running OpenWRT 19.x, in a small office environment.

The configuration for the switch and the cabled networks will be copied, so I suspect no problems there. My main concern is about the wifi networks: there are several wifi networks running, one for each subnet. The radio hardware of the two routers differ, so I can not just copy the whole file "/etc/config/wireless", but I can still copy the sections containing wifi names, passwords and white/black lists.

My question is this: will the wireless clients notice that the wifi router has changed and will they refuse to connect because of the different radio hardware, or doesn't this change matter, as long as the correct SSID and password is provided?

The wifi clients consist of Android devices, notebooks, and Apple smartphones. The owners of these devices are not working at the office every day, so it could be a tricky case of time management for me if I need to help each one of them reconnecting their devices to the network. :thinking:

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Your assumptions are correct. It would be best to configure the new device from scratch based on the backup from the old device.
As far as the clients are concerned, they should connect to the new device without issues.
If however some client won't connect, you should check that BSSID is not configured on them. This is locking the client to a specific mac ap.

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In general, the switch configuration cannot be copied from one device to another: some devices have two CPU ports, some have just one, and the LAN / WAN ports can also be different.

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@eduperez: my bad! Of course you're right, I should not just copy the network configuration files!

The cabled networks, the switch and the firewall can be set up very easy from scratch using the GUI, while copying the wireless network sections, that contain passwords and black lists, shouldn't be a big problem.

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