I am looking to ditch some PoE Ubiquiti hardware in favor of a DIY approach with 802.11ax cards. What card would you recommend for long-range 802.11ax? Are there gotchas when hosting with hostapd with some cards, like binary blob drivers, incomplete support, etc. that I should know about? Is there any reason I should avoid doing this? I will likely add omnidirectional antennas to this setup; what would you recommend there?
For what it’s worth, Ubiquiti stuff is expensive, and lately, they have embedded ads into their Unifi controller software that you host yourself. I really don’t like this move. I like the hands-off “appliance” approach to the APs, but they are still finicky, and I would feel a lot more at ease editing a configuration file than hosting a hefty piece of software that only runs on an obsolete version of Java.
Yeah, Ubiquiti has the “great at most things with a point-and-click UI” market down pat. Although, personally, I don’t really care about webapp UIs and such for networking gear. Give me a man page and configuration file, and I’ll get down to it.
Here’s a small ad block list for your Unifi controller, if it helps: https://github.com/synthead/unifi-adfree