CassandrichLazyweb, what's a decent wifi ap/router in the $50-100 price range that works painlessly with OpenWRT? Good antennas, decent speeds, and low power draw (long life on battery backup) are my main criteria. TP-Link would be my normal go-to vendor and I saw some praise for the Archer C7 which I could get for around $60 but I wasn't clear from the OpenWRT wiki if it's reliable.
In the past I've just run my own hostapd with a USB wifi adapter, but its performance is below uplink speed now, so I need to either get a much better USB wifi adapter or just switch to dedicated router.
srslypascalUSB wifi adapters are problematic by design. USB 2.0 devices will just be slow, but USB 3.0 actively emits noise in the 2.4 GHz band. Even the USB Implementers Forum acknowledges this: