USB 802.11 device

[slh]

OpenWrt on Orange pi R1

The situation around Realtek wireless drivers, particularly USB wireless drivers, is an utter mess. Realtek pushes out new, slightly changed, wireless chipsets 2-3 times a year, each with their own vendor driver[0], which is subsequently forgotten about immediately, in favour of the next one - but doesn't follow up with upstreaming them at all[1]. For a while these drivers were accepted into staging, but after six drivers ended up there[2], rotting away without ever getting closer to being mainl…

ASUS RT-AC68U - Using a USB WI-FI Dongle

There are no good USB wireless cards suitable for AP mode and 24/7 operations. Performance and range would be horrible thanks to the tiny antennas (which tend to be too close to each other for MIMO to be effective as well). Have a look at second hand wireless routers, sometimes you can find incredibly cheap offers with good specifications. The ipq806x range of devices would be roughly on par (surpassing) the features of your rt-ac68u, as would mt7622bv+mt7915e - ipq40xx or mt7621a would be slig…

The gist about USB wireless cards would be, "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

It's usually cheaper and a lot more reliable and performant to get a simple concurrent dual-band AP (wireless router with OpenWrt) to cover the wireless side, rather than wasting your time with USB wireless cards which will never work well enough. Depending on your needs both replacing the wrt3200acm or continuing to use it wired-only with a cheap mt7621 based AP attached would be the options.