R11e-5HacD as an AP

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi!

I’m currently having simple AR928X based mini PCIe wifi card in my “all-in-one box” as software AP. It works well, but only in 2.4GHz and not more than 5-8MB/s (most of the time ~ 3MB/s), coverage is not that good most likely because the card is not designed with AP in mind.

I would like to replace it with some AC enabled card and I’ve found R11e-5HacD.

The questions are as follows (I could not find detailed specs):

  • will this card work in general linux (chipset is QCA9882, which means that it could work using ath10k driver)
  • does this card support DFS
  • does it require special “sauce” like special firmware/driver patches etc. to work

I live in Latvia, so I suppose I can get it from euroDK, but I need to know whether I am able to use it as I would like.

thanks for answers
Eduards

2

Hi!

No clue? If that helps I plan to run card using hostapd.

regards
Mjasnik

3

hey!

same here!

i want to build an 5ghz ac ap based on generic linux and hostap using this card. i tried already some other cards (intel, broadcom): either they don’t have a proper linux device driver and/or they lack 5ghz ir (initial radiation - without you can’t announce an ap…). so i tried the R11e-5HacD… here is what i’ve tested so far:

  • doen’t work in an thinkpad and hp laptop with mpcie slot (maybe because of inserting it after the boot screen: laptop bios’ don’t want you to drive non-authorized wifi cards… so there’s no other way). when i remove the original card while having linux booted already an inserting the R11e-5HacD, dmesg shows the the card is not present because the link couldn’t be checked :frowning: at least some leds of the R11e-5HacD are glowing…
  • inserting a working mpcie-to-pcie adapter with the R11e-5HacD attached into my target system doesn’t work at all. no leds, nothing via lspci etc. just silence.
  • i’ve ordered a second mcpie-to-pcie adapter, because the old one is for half-sized mpcie cards… hope is the last to die!

what about your experiences? any luck so far?

best
-545ch

4

I am currently working on a new router-pc using the Intel DN2800MT which is running Ubuntu Server 14.10 and has a R11e-5HacD that I am planning on using as access point on the 5GHz band, this system also contains an AR9380-based wifi-card that’s set up as access point on the 2.4GHz band.

After some trial & error I managed to set up an access point using that card, unfortunately only up to 802.11n since 802.11ac support seems to be disabled in hostapd, support for ACS (automatic channel selection) is disabled as well. Both issues might be solved by manually enabling support in the source-code and then recompile hostapd.

The connection status-window on the Windows client that connected to the R11e-5HacD access point , using an AR9380-based card, indicated a bitrate of 144.4Mbps, but iperf won’t go above ~48Mbps.

So it’s not working perfect yet and I have no idea why. Maybe it’s the combination of 2 different wifi-cards? I could order another R11e-5HacD and put it in the Windows client, already found a Windows driver for a different card with the same hardware ID which seems to work with this card, couldn’t find a driver from the manufacturer though.

Here’s my current hostapd.conf for the R11e-5HacD:

interface=wlan1
driver=nl80211
ssid=test5g
channel=36
hw_mode=a
ieee80211n=1
#ieee80211ac=1
ieee80211d=1
ieee80211h=1
wmm_enabled=1
auth_algs=1
wpa=2
wpa_passphrase=**********
wpa_pairwise=CCMP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP
country_code=NL
ieee80211d=1
ht_capab=[SHORT-GI-20][SHORT-GI-40][TX-STBC][RX-STBC1][DSSS_CCK-40]

ieee80211ac=1 is written as comment, once support for that option is available, just remove # and it should work on ac as well.

As for Linux support: Ubuntu Server 14.10 did show some errors during 1st boot, but the card does seem to work out of the box. Although the errors I saw (something about board.bin/firmware.bin files I believe) might have been solved by installing updates. I didn’t have to do anything special to get this card to be recognized.