I have used open wrt on a personal router for a few years now and love it. I am moving soon to college and was looking to use an orange pi 5 + running open wrt (and some other stuff) and need a small access point for my dorm. Needs to be 5ghz(too many ppl running 2.4 clogging it up) and only needs to support a few devices. I was looking at using an ax200 but after reading up on that it will not work. I was wondering if there are any m.2 wifi cards that will work and if not, any USB dongles that you would recommend? I know I could use a separate access point but for reasons I am trying to keep it cheap, small, and not using another power plug.
Any advice would be helpful I do not know a whole lot and just starting to learn a lot more about all this stuff.
Why not go for a cheap router ?
I am planning on running other stuff on the orange pi and cause of rules I am allowed to get a router with wireless turned off but I am allowed to have a separate access point or hotspot running 5 or 6ghz with the strength turned down. The router itself will not work cause they say no routers with an access point built in. The rules are weird.
Something cheap with mt7621a+mt7915DBDC (e.g. dap-x1860, covr-x1860, wsm20, etc.) will be cheaper (~15 EUR) than any 5 GHz && AP mode capable m.2 card.
While they can refuse you service (internet access) for any made-up reason they like, they cannot legally forbid you to run an AP on 2.4, 5 or 6 GHz - nor can they programmatically distinguish a wired- from a wifi router over the network. While it always makes sense to behave on their network, I would look into a cheap OpenWrt capable wifi router matching your performance requirements, retain the orangepi for something it's better suited for (and not running OpenWrt, but a more general purpose linux).
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