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hostapd + 6E = WMX7205 ~$70

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Tech Junky

Part of the Furniture
So, having run hostapd in the past and using internal cards to do so this is a nice option to see finally. Taking this card and putting it into a PC or PI gives you 6E AP functionality for a fraction of the price of a 6E router / AP.

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The only issue is shipping costs being ~$42 for a single card or $50 for 2... shipping rates from CA based on cart total.

Same card from a tech standpoint higher per unit @ $70/ea but, free shipping. (on backorder status)

$100/1
$166/2

or

$70/1
$140/2

There's also a 4x4 module in hmPCIE format for $99 that would work in an older laptop or with a PCI adapter in a desktop/server setup. QCN9074

Also, a 6 not 6E option for desktop / server use $70 using a MediaTek chipset - MT7915 - mPCIE
 
for a dyi wifi6e router, you'll need three of those cards - one for each band - the cards themselves are multiband, but only one band is in use at any given time.

ath11k foss drivers are not very mature at the moment, really need to use the closed source drivers for AP mode - which means talking to Qualcomm under NDA and business agreement.

I'll pass for now...

they're decent enough client cards, but the ax210 is better and at a much lower cost
 
Or you setup 3 service files to activate the 3 bands.

I had to run dual service files to get both 2.4/5 working on my old implementation or start each chip on its own.

The only reason I mention getting more than 1 is to get full use of 4x4 bumping the LAN speed over WIFI to 2.4gbps instead of the max 2x2 of 1.2gbps..... err I haven't put together that option in a thread yet. I'm still gathering pieces of the puzzle for the slot pref / 4t4r / etc. There's a lot of segmentation between different cards from single band options to tri-band options.

The biggest issue though is pairing 4T4R client & server side to get the bandwidth advantages. For this it might be an instance of more than one card or a super dongle to make it work on a laptop. Most of the 4x4 models are mPCIE which doesn't fit in modern laptops since everyone moved to E-key.
 
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Dug into the options a little deeper this time and found some oddities and some other decent options

single bandsWallys DR9074 4T4R MMCX 4x4QCN9074/9024 M.2 EHE160 $95.00
not 6EWPEQ-405AX4T4R MHF1 4x4QCN9074/9024 MINI PCIEHE160 $84.50
WMX7203-1F2T2R MHF1 2x2QCA2066-5HE160 $67.50
2.4/5/6GHzWMX7205-12T2R MHF42x2QCA2066-5HE160 $67.50
sam 7203/72052x2WCN6856-5$67.50
Tri-BandWNFQ-268AXI2T2R MHF42x2WCN6856M.2 EHE160 $72.00
5G or 6G + 2.4WMX72052T2R MHF42x2WCN6856M2HE160 $61.70
not 6EEmWicon WMX7402-3 3T3RMHF13x3QCN9074/9024 HE160 $79
no 2.4GWMX74064T4R MHF14x4QCN9074-0MINI PCIEHE160 $96.90

Thinking the WMX7205 hits a happy medium between 6Ghz / price. Going with a 4x4 option would be nice just for the extra 2 lanes but, there really aren't any clients that do 4x4 unless it's a full size PC with a similar card in it to take advantage of the additional BW. I suppose getting a 2nd card and a USB adapter for the laptop would work too but, that's a bit inconvenient to drag around or deal with the risk of breaking it when moving the system around.
 
I used WMX7205 for months and very satisify about its stability and signal strength ; compared with AX210 , AX200 ans killer 1650X , WMX7205 wins for every part . However , I have no idea how to make Dual Band Simultaneous(DBS) work till now ......Thanks in advance if someone could guide me how to do it .
 

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@Egg When I was running a rt2600ac the chips showed up as 2 of them and just copied the service / conf file and duplicated it for the second interface and attached a service to it to run at boot.
 
I used WMX7205 for months and very satisify about its stability and signal strength ; compared with AX210 , AX200 ans killer 1650X , WMX7205 wins for every part . However , I have no idea how to make Dual Band Simultaneous(DBS) work till now ......Thanks in advance if someone could guide me how to do it .
Looking at the pic closer it looks like the card might be the 7203 based on the IC shown and the FCC ID .

Also, the issue with Intel models is you can't hostAP them beyond 2.4ghz because they locked it down. Forces you to wait for RTL / WCA / BCM chips to make things work.

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@Egg When I was running a rt2600ac the chips showed up as 2 of them and just copied the service / conf file and duplicated it for the second interface and attached a service to it to run at boot.
Thanks a lot for your advise ; I assumed you were running Linux , so that you got conf file to duplicated . However , there's nothing can be found in Windows 11....and one more wired thing is there are 4 same adapters but different MAC address found via third party application , but in device manager there's only one Qualcomm WIFI adapter .
 

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An option would be livecd Linux and do a lspci to find out how it shows up as a single or multiple adapter. I'd you're wanting to run it as an AP maybe use a VM of Linux to control it as you can still run Windows and a VM won't consume much resources for the AP. Maybe 10GB for the virtual disk and 2GB of RAM. Not sure if the performance though compared to a native Linux install. Another option would be using a pi to host it. For VMS I use virtual box as it's free and does the same thing as VMware.
 
Ordered a couple of EmWicon WMX7205 cards to internalize the AP function to add 6ghz and ditch the external AP / POE injector.

The unknown though is whether I can get the 160mhz working on the AX cards as the last time I used AC it was being temperamental but, since the physical AP has been stable @ 160mhz for quite awhile I suspect the interference causing it to fila on the prior attempts should be gone.
 
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Yeah, well aware of those. Used them in the past for QCA9984 IIRC. kvalo tends to have the firmware needed before it shows up from anyone else. There's another https://www.gateworks.com/linux-wireless-ap-configuration/ that has some firmware and even compiles custom kernel/headers.

Something new I noticed is the AX cards seem to use 3 bin files vs 2 w/ AC. Not a big deal as long as they're stable and don't crash all the time. It's been awhile since I've tinkered with things in hostapd but, I still have the files from the AC implementation to just simply tweak to get things working. Change the IF name to match the card and add some AX config to the file. If the new cards show up as a single chip that makes life easier to combine 2 files / services into a single implementation. The rt2600ac seemed to have 2 individual controllers on it that split the duties between bands into separate files/services.

The interesting part will be if it will run tri-band 2.4/5/6 all at once or if you actually need to pick 5 or 6 like has been hinted in the descriptions.
https://novotech.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/WMX7205-Datasheet_v0.1.5.pdf
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Seems to me this would be more for the client only operation rather than in AP mode. Even if it's not the case I don't have any issue with 5ghz over 6ghz currently. Knowing the speed with either is the same anyway doesn't influence using one over the other. Going 6ghz though might be a cleaner path though and unlock some additional BW between 2 6ghz devices w/o any other interference from other devices on 2.4/5. If I could get 2x2 2400mbps to work that would double throughput to ~2.6gbps or max it out at 2.4gbps - overhead.

I already get the link rate of 2400 on AX 5ghz just not the throughput. It's just going to be nice to have direct access to the data passing through the system instead of trapping it off an Ethernet port from the external AP. Not to mention not needing to update the SW for the AP with manual checks. More control over things that are limited in the AP OS.

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Ran into a snag on the order as they're out of stock and got a refund.

Looked into the MT7921 as an option and though it's 1/2 the theoretical speed of the AX210/WMX7205 it's also considerably cheaper at $15/M2 vs the ~$70/WM7205.

Code:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09MBMXNYB- M2 only $16
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081ZKTFN2 - M2 / PCIE + antennas - $20

Plan is to use one for hosting an AP and the other as a client to the GW for a WIFI redundancy when moving the GW around for better throughput since the AX210 is being finicky about throughput in the server for some reason. I'm thinking the MT7921 should perform well enough at lower BW on the GW to not impact WWAN speeds. The internal LAN speeds might take a small hit though but that's yet to be seen with testing. I don't think it's going to make much of a significant difference though even though the AX210 is LR@2.4gbps and the MT's LR are 1.2gbps. If they will do concurrent 5G/6G that would put them at 2.4gbps though the BW is 80mhz vs 160mhz with the AX210. Then again if they do DC that effectively doubles to 160 again.

For 50% of the cost of the QCA's though it should suffice as long as they're stable. The alternative is ordering the WCN6856 @ $60/ea as they do have those in stock. I couldn't really spot any differences between the QCA vs WCN though other than the WCN seems to be more consumer common for it has some perks on the BT audio side. There's no real way to compare the two anywhere and there's not a data sheet that dives into the specs deep enough to tell the differences. We'll see how the MT's work out and go from there.
 
Well, the Mt7921K's were unimpressive. I discovered also hostapd doesn't want to enable ieee80211ax even though it's an option in the config templates along with anything that enable HE. I'm fairly certain this is a program issue and not related to the MTK chipset. I was able to get the MTK's working but, the speeds capped at B/G/N under 100mbps. The AX210 at least as a client hits top end 866mbs but can't be used for an AP beyond 2.4ghz bands due to it being a disabled / hobbled feature by Intel.

Now, the debate is whether to push forward with getting Qualcomm based chips and continue down the path of an internal AP w/ AC speeds until hostapd unlocks the AX feature set and enable it at a later time or just forgo the whole idea and wait for WIFI7 to be released.
 
hostapd unlocks the AX feature set

Hostapd just configures the interface, the driver defines the features...

I've got an IPQ60xx device sitting on the shelf, maybe later today I'll hook it up and take a peek at the hostapd configurations... It's QSDK, but should be good enough...
 
Well, the MTK driver just didn't do it then but, the output upon failure of hostapd noted errors with those specific lines related to ax/be. At this point I think I'll just wait it out on WiFi 7.

I did pick up some AX411 cards though in the meantime for $19/ea vs Amazon wanting $36/ea.
 

So, playing around a bit more with the AX411 card I've got it working in hostapd w/ 5GHZ which is kind of a trick since Intel disables this option normally. Well, I did some detective work and found some pieces of the puzzle that I had been playing with the MTK chips apply to unlocking the Intel cards.

lar_disable=1 - /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf -- this makes the 5ghz band work in hostapd

I started off with a really basic config and got the card up in AP mode and then tinkered from there a bit to add more functionality to the "AP" such as getting higher speeds out of it by enabling further commands to the config file.

Initially the system brought up the card in AP mode but, wouldn't give me an IP which led to needing to add the br0 interface to the basic config and that was solved. I had this in my other AP files but, since I wanted to start over and figure out how to unlock the Intel card for 5Ghz I missed readding it.

I got beyond that and has basic connectivity on 5ghz and did a couple of speed tests which were dismal to say the least at ~40-50mbps DL / 20-30mbps UL
Made some tweaks based off the output from - "iw list | more" which gives you the options the card is capable of. Added those into the config and that unlocked 135/50 speed which is decent enough for the moment.

Now unlocking more speed is the focus I need to dig into the "HE" options and see what works / doesn't to unlock the AX benefits as sit seems like it's just using the AC options at this point. Having a connection rate of 400mbps isn't bad but, my actual AP connects to the phone @ 1200mbps and laptop @ 2400mbps.

Things are moving in the right direction though being that I haven't spent more money on adapters based on Qualcomm chips at this point though in the past they have provided full speeds in comparison but, this is still better than intel suck on 2.4 only and twice the speed so far. Goal being to get the link rate up as far as possible to get internal LAN speeds comparable to the AP which will be difficult due to the AX411 only supporting 80mhz

It won't take the "ieee80211ax=1" option in the config / errors...so... yeah it's going to get interesting trying to push it to higher bandwidth.

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I've got an IPQ60xx device sitting on the shelf, maybe later today I'll hook it up and take a peek at the hostapd configurations... It's QSDK, but should be good enough...

Posted hostapd configs in the other thread...

too bad we can't merge the two, as they have a lot in common
 
$85 + shipping to make your own 6E AP out of a PC / PI / etc.

I've tried to get my hands on these QCA chips in the past and never could get them delivered. I tried the MTK option and it sucked but, mouser is reliable for shipping. Now, of course the dilemma is waiting on the BE chips to come out that are coming from Intel / QC / MTK and possible BCM. Hard to gauge when they will actually be released for sales as right now they're being dumped for production of "MAX" mobo refreshes for Intel. BE from Intel mouser has listed for Nov restock right now. The problem with Intel as shown above is the hoops you have to jump through to make them work in AP mode at a reduced speed.

Too bad it took over a year to circle back to this with an available card that will actually ship.
 

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