I'm wondering if it's possible to limit what 5GHz channels my WiFi AP (Netgear WAX202 on vanilla openwrt 23.05.3) can choose when on auto channel selection. I ask because it is ax capable and there's loads of other APs nearby so I want the AP to have the flexibility to choose a clear channel. I turned on ax the other day which worked great and was initially backwards compatible with some of my older devices. I then noticed a day later that some of those older devices could no longer see the SSID, and when I checked the AP had switched to a channel somewhere over 100. When I changed it to a lower channel my older devices could see and connect to that SSID once again.
So is it possible to keep ax turned on with auto channel selection, but somehow limit the channels that can be selected?
Thank you, will check that out and try to implement over the next few days to see if it works. I did search before posting, but obviously I didn't search well enough...
@Underworld's reference got me wondering about this, so I dug into it. There's nothing I could find in LuCI to set channels, so I just manually edited the config (RT3200, but should be same on WAX202, I'd think).
$ cat /etc/config/wireless
...
config wifi-device 'radio1'
option type 'mac80211'
option phy 'wl1'
option band '5g'
option htmode 'HE80'
option cell_density '0'
option country 'US'
option channel 'auto'
option channels '1-100' <-- added this line
option txpower '6'
option disabled '0'
$ service wpad restart
... get disconnected, wait 2-minutes or so for DFS to do its thing, and reconnect ...
$ grep chan /tmp/run/hostapd-wl1.conf
channel=acs_survey
chanlist=1-100
chan_util_avg_period=600
$ iwinfo wl1-ap0 info | grep -i chan
Mode: Master Channel: 52 (5.260 GHz) HT Mode: HE80
Center Channel 1: 58 2: unknown
So, it looks like it worked, or at least hostapd didn't barf when it saw the channels spec.
Hi Eric, long time no speak. Looks like you've done a legendary job deciphering this stuff for me again. I'll have a pop at that over the next few days and see how it goes. Hope you're doing well. Happy
All worked beautifully, had a slight headscratcher with your last 2 commands but then worked out it was just different name for the adapters on the Netgear WAX202 so my stuff looks like this...
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /etc/config/wireless
config wifi-device 'radio1'
option type 'mac80211'
option path '1e140000.pcie/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:02:00.0+1'
option band '5g'
option htmode 'HE80'
option channel 'auto'
option channels '1-134' -- this seemed optimum
option country 'GB'
option cell_density '0'
Weirdly when I was messing around manually with which channels would work, I could set it as high as 140 with it still being seen by the old devices, but when I had
option channels '1-140'
I found the old device lost the signal at one point. Although my device now currently shows:
when I checked on the device when it wasn't connecting it has something like master channel at 138 or 140, and centre channel at 144 (or vice versa). But anyways, all working beautifully now, so thanks for all the help.
I hope that OpenWrt UI can have a selection to avoid DFS when running auto (my old Asus router firmware has "Auto but no DFS" option so it will never choose DFS)