“I bought this as the Pi5 is in a case and mounted below a metal table with a metal enclosure and milling machine on top so the internal WiFi was struggling so this seemed a good solution to get the WiFi out to a better location. I plugged it in and got a shortcut to a USB storage device with the Windows set-up files for the product and no WiFI adaptor. After investigating it seems this is a dual mode USB device which I hadn't heard of before and it defaults to appearing as a storage device and the LinuxCNC distro 2.9.8-trixie doesn't include the package usb-modeswitch as standard but it is available to install and after that I had a WiFI adaptor as indicated in the product description and all worked fine after that. Initial testing shows much improved performance with the WiFI adaptor away from the machine compared to the inbuilt one. I checked my normal distro on my Pi4 and it seems to include usb-modeswitch as standard as does my Ubuntu desktop. It seems usb-modeswitch handles changing the the device mode automatically when it's recognised if it is among the list of dual mode devices it knows about.”
“The use case is to create an additional Wifi network to access a Raspberry Pi server with no Internet access whatsoever. Typically sensors are attached to this isolated network. It enforces a cloud-less way of working.
This USB wifi adapter is bought after a handfull of other USB wifi adapters, each with a different chipset. They did not work out of the box with an up-to-date RPi running bullseye (Raspbian 11). An update for a Realtek 8192EU chip, which used to work, does not function any more. TheMT7612U is attache via a Raspberry USB hub, with an additional power source, to the RPi 3B+, and worked immediatly. An accesspoint is created using hostapd. It has two small antenna's, which do give enough signal strength throughout the house, but larger (more sensitive) antenna's would have been better.”
“I recently bought a Pi 5 8mb as a kit... it came with a nice sturdy aluminium case.
Bad move because the metal case is quite an effective Faraday Cage and really attenuated rhe wireless signal.
This little aerial seamlessly plugged in (blue USB port) and pulled in wireless networks from halfway along the road.
Needless to say, I'm now switched into 400mb/search on the less used 5ghz channel of our home router.”
“Worked straight out of the box.... BUT...
I bought a Pi 5 and foolishly chose a metal box - the Pi aerial on board is really small with no plug for an external aerial.
The metal box is a wonderful Faraday Shield and basically killed all but working right next to the router.
The external wireless dongle works great but is so wide it takes up two USB spaces... otherwise it would be a 5*”
“I've only tested two of the three units I purchased. One was for an access point running @2.4G and the other for a 5G AP on my Pi 5. Both just worked. Getting USB dongles to work and stay working on a Raspberry Pi is a pain.”
