Technical Technicalities - Asus AI Mesh/Realtek adapters

Wifi Upgrades

I purchased an Asus router a while back as I wanted native DD-WRT support as well as the ability to use mesh in the future, which Asus AiMesh seemed to have a good name for.

In our old place I had the ISP as the router and ran a cable across the floor to my Asus AC3100 as a second AP. In our new place I really wanted it to be wireless. I purchased an Asus AX52 as a secondary node in the Asus AiMesh. For our backyard, which is the highlight of the house for me, we went from constant disconnects and maybe 1 to 10 Mbps up to 120 consistently, which has been nice.

There were some abnormalities that had to be fixed in order to get this to work. The AC3100 is American and the AX52 is EU, so it only overlaps in specific bands. The AiMesh wasn't too happy trying to pick a band itself, so I set it to 36 and it's been rock solid.

Realtek Issues

I picked up a new ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 laptop recently. I will probably make a post once it's in a bit of a better state, as it's getting a new top and bottom cover as well as screen.

Either way, the laptop has a Ryzen chipset, which means shit Wi-Fi as it won't come with an Intel chip. It will be a MediaTek or Realtek variant. Mine being a Realtek 8852CE.

None of my devices have had any issues with this setup until I got this computer. It would never connect to the mesh AP, it would only try to hold onto the main router. And when it would disconnect, it would not reconnect to the mesh,even if the mesh was the only one it could see.

I played around with power settings both in Windows and Fedora to no avail. The fix was simple: lock it to the mesh AP in the Asus software. Now, this only works for me as I have good coverage everywhere with the AP extender and would not work if you actually needed the extender inside, but I digress. It works for me and saved me from spending another 25 bucks on a new Wi-Fi card.

Toodles.

This is day 45 of #100DaysToOffload