From time to time, AliExpress sends me emails that show off some really nice deals. One said deal was 30% off a FENVI-branded USB 3.0 WiFi 6 Adapter. I decided to check it out and order one unit.
The unit arrived after a bit of an extended wait due to the Chinese Lunar New Year. Once it arrived, I immediately plugged it into my OpenWRT powered router. The device itself looks like the image shown to the right.
What are you?
Running lsusb on the router revealed that it was a MediaTek 7921AU chip given the 0e8d:7961 MediaTek Inc. Wireless_Device identification strings.
OpenWRT immediately picked this up and displayed it as the following in the WiFi page:
Since this adapter is mostly used for a WiFi AC/AX access point (since the router doesn’t have a decent Mini-PCIe WiFi device installed), setting up a WiFi network in Access Point mode was pretty easy.
For compatibilities sake, I went with AX WiFi mode, selected a 5 Ghz band that doesn’t use DFS (something to do with radar detection, which delays setting up the WiFi network), set the country code to AU (Australia), the SSID to my desired network name and encryption type. After that, it was off to the races!
Extras
It also came with a Windows driver CD that I made a backup of. I don’t know how different the drivers are from what you could get from the Mediatek OEM website but I might upload them at some point.
There was some reviews saying some people had issues of this device not working after a few days, but so far so good in Wireless AP mode. Maybe the Windows drivers botch things up, who knows?
Overall experience so far on Day 2 with the device is pretty good with any major issues, but I guess time will tell.