Netgear WNDR3400v2 dual band repeater

On 11 Mar 2023, Andy Burnelli snipped-for-privacy@nospam.net posted some news <news:tuiumc$1q9nh$ snipped-for-privacy@paganini.bofh.team>:

There are a lot of routers that can't be upgraded to dresdren-wrt, hyperwrt, lede, tomato, freshtomato, freetz, debwrt, voxel, openwirelessrouter and similar firmware flashes for those routers.

Probably when you purchase a router, you have to look then to see if there is already existing firmware for it before you bother to buy the router.

After five or so years you'll inevitably be flashing that firmware when you repurpose the router for triple distances, so you probably want to also consider the amount of usably flashable ram at the time of purchase.

Having removable antennae is also a good feature to look for when you consider almost everyone repurposes their old router instead of trashing it, often as a directional device hundreds of feet from the home itself.

Some of the things you can repurpose a five year old router into are a directional access point (useful for niche connections), a switch, a station (aka client) with nat & dhcp enabled, a station bridge (aka client bridge) with nat & dhcp disabled, a repeater, a repeater bridge and ad-hoc.

You can even repurpose the router as a dedicated web server, a dedicated home nas server, a dedicated vpn server, a dedicated streamer, etc.

Almost everyone has a use for one of those, particularly if you raise the transmit power from about 70 (default) to about 100 (warm) or 120 (hot) and if you then add a directional antenna which can triple usable distances.