The last I looked, the Intel 6e wifi cards did not work in AP mode, so building one was not an option. And sorting through the OpenWRT supported routers and trying to correspond that to 6e models from https://www.wi-fi.org/product-finder-results?sort_by=certifi... is rather challenging. Especially since vendors re-cycle model numbers..
But the short answer for routers with OpenWRT 6E support is no. For m.2 6 GHz capable cards that have Linux drivers and support AP mode I know Qualcomm has a few models that fit that bill, in general just search any tri-band module from them and you should be set. Broadcom probably does as well but I'm not as familiar with those.
I passed dying on this hill long ago though. Even if you get such a card, get it working, and avoid bugs you're still going to be loading binary firmware to it. A much easier way to achieve the same level of openness is to buy a well supported router with AP mode and a properly designed antenna pattern then hanging that off a port on your open router; filtering any packets that source from the management MAC of the AP to completely isolate it.
Yeah but you're still trusting the black box to (a) implement security (WPA) correctly and (b) not get hacked and spew out packets onto the wired interface with forged MAC addresses claiming to be from your laptop's wifi card.
I've run into this problem before and currently I'm leaning towards just doing wide-open no security 802.11 with nothing-but-wireguard-packets firewalls on both ends of the wireless link. Basically s/wpa/wireguard/g.
That said if "attacking your adapter's/router's firmware flaws for an encryption/authentication vulnerability so they can hack in enough device control to fake being a valid client and further hack you from that launch point" is a real enough concern for you to be worried about then my first recommendation would be to stop using Wi-Fi in the first place, the entire design of the discovery and advertisement portion of the protocol is the anti-thesis to what you need.
However if you really think you can outdo everybody else by ground up building your own Wi-Fi system then a secure tunnel like wireguard or IPsec or so on will at least provide you a second layer that'd need to be attacked. That said such a layer is probably good for you in this case regardless and I'm not sure why you'd replace WPA* instead of use it as yet another layer of protection.
Have you spent any time reading the source code of wpa_supplicant?
I still have nightmares from that.
01:00.0 Unclassified device [0002]: MEDIATEK Corp. MT7915E 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter
Bought from here: [1]
Works with no hassle as AP under stock Linux kernel.
[1] https://www.asiarf.com/shop/wifi-wlan/wifi_mini_pcie/wifi6-4...
Two weird caveats I had to overcome: 1. I had to compile OpenWRT from master myself so that I could configure the WiFi 6 interface using Luci (the web ui), because the latest stable release does not include that functionality. 2. I bought two of them for two floors and OpenWRT somehow managed to generate the same BSSID for both of those routers, which caused both of the networks to be inoperable. To fix this I had to edit a bash script which generates the BSSID in OpenWRT and change it to something else.
I suspect Wi-Fi 7 will be more common. Wi-Fi 6E was great but unless you're one of the rare consumers that is going to replace every client chip you can to gain use out of that 3rd band it's identical to the Wi-Fi 6 equipment many just recently upgraded to. Wi-Fi 7 will have the benefit of some phones/laptops already being 6 GHz capable at launch (even if only 6E devices at first) as well as being a general improvement and farther apart for most in their upgrade cycles.
I'd recommend just buying a nice wifi 6 system that puts clients and backhaul both on 5ghz.
I routinely pull 500mbps from a satellite on a wifi 6 mesh network(asus xt8), I don't see much need to upgrade.
Although this could conceivably be open source friendly with such controls only on the radio software, so far manufacturers have responded by simply locking down the devices.
As a prime example, ASUS merlin is actually open source and compatible with a number of WiFi 6 routers: https://github.com/RMerl/asuswrt-merlin.ng
However, directly in response to the FCC rules, ASUS has restricted the ability of end users to havk on their own devices, giving only one person the ability to publish signed builds.
You have to look hard. It's basically only Atheros 9280 that can do all that with FOSS firmware. You also have to make sure the device has TWO RF front end chips (one for each band). Just looking for "AR9280" will get you a lot of single-band products.
There are also devices with that chip plus an AR7010, which is a nifty little USB-to-PCie bridge so the whole thing fits on a USB stick, like this:
Also I think you meant 802.11n, while the card does support 802.11a that is 54 Mbps on 5 GHz only.
wlx00a096****** IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"XXXXXXXX"
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.18 GHz Access Point: XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Bit Rate=300 Mb/s Tx-Power=30 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-31 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
They don't have an expiration date, you know. We aren't talking about fruit here.
And yes, like everybody on planet earth other than the IEEE -- including the people at Qualcomm/Atheros who wrote the source code for my wifi card's firmware -- use "a" to mean "5ghz band". People need to abandon this silly crusade to insist that "5ghz band" does not have an 802.11 designator, as if it is a feature with no name or something.
The problem, which you're ignoring, is that there are multiple 802.11 standards for operating in the 5GHz band. Treating the oldest and slowest among them as if it's synonymous with all 5GHz WiFi is just plain wrong, because the successive standards for 5GHz WiFi have meaningful improvements in capability.
(Granted the person you were replying to also said 300Mbps on 802.11a, which is of course not possible.)
Not rotting isn't the same thing as being new. The best it can do is hold steady to the age it came out at with whatever enhancements can be provided in firmware. Ignoring ac(1/2)/ax and 6 GHz there are also a litany of intermediate standards (hence the letter skips) many of which are relevant to all PHY standards.
No matter how you slice it these things are ancient. That said it's great you can make it work for you though as there are no newer alternatives to fall back to.
Are there any USB-3 devices like that?