I am using Netgear R7800 and it's an excellent OpenWRT router, imho. R7800 is a few years old and if I were to get a new router (wifi 6/ax) that runs OpenWRT very well and has a good dev support, which one would you recommend in the $200 - $300?
The R7800 has a decent CPU that can handle even a slightly above average network connection, and decent (4x4 AC) Wifi that AX will not improve horribly much upon. What exactly are the shortcomings you would like to rectify?
Some areas in my house have a spotty wifi coverage with R7800. It's 5+ years old and doesn't have the latest wifi 6 (ax) speeds even though my ISP is capped at 500/500. Just curious to know what the OpenWrt gurus use other than the R7800 so that if a deal pops up in the future, I can grab it and see whether it improves the wifi coverage.
Also, if I set it up R7800 as an AP and use another wired router to my FIOS ONT (have a spare ASUS RT-87U and a ASUS RT-68U), will it improve the coverage area?
Yes, I can move the R7800 to the study (setup as an AP) and leave the other router next to the ONT (setup as Router mode), will it degrade the performance and the bottleneck might be the lower powered router (either ASUS Rt-87U or ASUS RT-68U)?
But, the AP needs to hard wired to the other router, correct? Which means it's not going to improve the coverage as I am not sure how it works in this config.
A different access point at the same location will probably not give you a significantly better coverage.
In this case I would probably recommend the opposite, get a (comparatively cheap) second access point and place it strategically in the house (the "study"?, as a dumb AP, with a wired connection to the main router).
Personally, my current go-to for a cheap and cheerful access point is a TP-Link RE650 v1 (also running OpenWrt, natch).
That will be a problem as I cannot have wired connection across rooms between R7800 (AP) and the other router. I can think of it to use as a wireless ethernet bridge but it degrades the speeds, correct?
I am using a powerline adapter (Zyxel AV2000) and it helps to some extent (get about 180 Mbps out of 500). Not bad but would like to use the full speeds if possible.
I would question this. On non-DFS channels, a single-radio 5 GHz repeater is viable (this message has been sent through such setup). Given four antennas on each R7800, I would even guess that 500 Mbps of the repeated traffic is reachable.
So, if I buy Linksys MR8300 (which has 512 MB RAM), the powerline adapter will be able to achieve 500 Mbps as it's a tri-band router?
I thought Linksys EA8300 is similar to MR8300 but has only 256 MB RAM. So, I guess MR8300 is a good bet which is just $4 above EA8300 on Amazon (renewed).