Hi@All
My neighbor kindly provided me access to his ap, located behind his window that I can see when looking through my window, there are ca 30m between our buildings.
My first attempt was a Raspberry 3 with a ralink WiFi usb2 adapter as station (client) and a cheap realtec usb2 adapter with hostapd, but after a couple of days testing I found the performance not sufficient, especially as it depends strong on weather conditions. Rx is low but stable, while Tx error rate is about 50%, resulting in 5-10 Mbit speed, often less
Fortunately as I connected with my mobile (Xiaomi note 9 pro) the same test (Speedcheck website) was 70-90 Mbps, so I looked with wifianalyser and found out that his AP is dual band and providing 5GHz.
Unfortunately it is not so easy to find a chipset that would support 5GHz with hostapd, and even when, the bottleneck of shared usb2 of Raspberry Pi wouldn't allow better performance as well. So befor I go bye 2 WiFi 1200 USB adapter and spend days with figuring out, which patch to use to make it work with hostapd while facing the other restrictions, I would rather invest in a router with openWRT in STA+AP mode.
The only thing that would be nice to have is to connect a camera to film our squirrel feeding station on the tree outside but due to versatility of openWRT I am shure to develop further wishes once
Please, suggest reliable hardware for my purposes, a router or maybe nanoPi or another board with two usb3 adapters? or anything you think is suitable. Thanks in advance!
Thank you for you suggestions. Unfortunately wire is not possible here. An outdoor device would not serve the purpose to have an ap for inside the house. Actually I did not get better performance with open window compared to behind glas, the sweet spot is right behind the window inside near the wall. I consider to use some decent outdoor antenna but it's not crucial. I like the idea of having kind of Linux machine I can log in to over SSH and use it as a little server, but there are many posts suggest to use a dictated router instead of Raspi cause it would be much faster. Therefore an openWRT device would be the best for this job, it actually only have to support STA+AP at 5GHz and have a usb port for a camera. Would TP-Link Archer C7 so the job? Or is Raspi 4 with 2x usb3 1200 WiFi adapter as good too? Than which chipset to use than?
I'd still use some sort of outdoor device (placed just on the inside of the window) since they have a directional antenna. The Unifi Nanostation ACloco is small and inexpensive. It would be kind of overkill at a 30 meter distance but more signal is always good. Also there's less noise and interference since it's receiving mostly from one direction. A device like this would need to be combined with another router for your local wifi and USB.
Archer C7 would suit the job as well but you should be able to find a MT7621 device for less money and it would have more performance also.
but due to versatility of openWRT I am shure to develop further wishes once