Hey folks,
I was looking for this exact thing and this post came up in a Google search as a top result, and sadly most of the links in it are dead now. I tried looking up the previous solutions posted and the routers that were made aren't anymore, it's hard to find those Mikrotik Metal units even secondhand.
Well, I was driven by this thread to press on with a different solution and I felt compelled to share it.
I don't have a Presonus mixer so I don't really want to say what model it is, but it's one of the ones with no physical user interface to speak of, everything is controlled via tablet, so it fits nicely in one end of a 4U box. The manufacturer made some (what I would consider to be) interesting decisions regarding how it handles networking with a strong suggestion that an external router should be used.
I started off with using a TotoLink router because it had the biggest antennas I could find along with a WISP mode. I fabricated some rack adapters for the antennas out of a piece of aluminum and zip tied the router to a rack shelf. A piece of velcro on the power adapter fastened it to the back of the Furman in the box.
Please excuse the quality of this image, apparently I didn't take any stills of this setup so this is a screenshot of a video
After this point I did actually get a proper Furman secondhand and some other modifications to the box.
The range from this router was actually bordering on absurd, in that I could go to the other end of the parking lot that was on the opposite side of the building from where this box was and still be connected to it.
The main issue is I'm sure most folks have not heard of TotoLink. The box claims they're big in Korea... this router will just randomly decide it hates WISP, it hates the mixer, or it hates me.
Not to mention those antennas don't tend to want to stay up like that. The picture doesn't show but they're over a foot long and pretty heavy, held up entirely by over tightening SMA connectors.
New solution time, went looking for this thread, and explored the options. I want internal antennas so its easier to stuff this thing under a stage, I want it to be more reliable, and I kinda need it to have that WISP mode.
So I bought a TP-Link A7 AC1750. It was cheap enough, at $45 for a refurbished unit, and the fact that it has grooves in the top to channel zip ties in place was appealing. The way the power brick is designed I couldn't just velcro it to the back of the Furman, so I had to make a little adapter cable to also zip tie it to the shelf. I did try to use a Linksys WRT-AC1200 as well but it turned out to be taller than 1U...
You'll also note that this router has some kind of Alexa integration that I don't care about and it makes no mention of a WISP mode. I loaded OpenWRT onto it to take care of that, along with making the thing more stable. An addon for OpenWRT is TravelMate which makes the WISP mode much easier to manage.
I know this isn't ideal, but the reality is that I don't need it to send wifi across the state, I need it to go maybe 300 feet for the most part. The device I'm controlling this from is also usually connected to the box via bluetooth for canned music.
At the same time I upgraded from a very cheap but effective Bluetooth receiver to a Marantz PMD-526C
Inside the box (click for bigger)
The antennas should be 1/4 wave dipoles, which would mean they have a toroidal pattern. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The placement here should just about make the pattern of wifi coming out of the box fairly omnidirectional, except for the big metal box going in the front. This is a Rev. 5 of the C7 router; Revs 3 and below have their 2.4GHz antennas internal to the plastic case and the 5GHz antennas are external. Revs 4 and 5 replace the internal antennas with dual band external ones for stronger 2.4GHz. If you do go searching, definitely make sure you're getting a C7 and not the A7 (the Alexa version) since the OpenWRT support is way better on the C7... hardware wise they're identical but there's some deeper issues. As it is, with an A7, OpenWRT doesn't even come out of the box with the graphical UI.
The other issue I ran into is that OpenWRT is fairly slow to boot. My mixer will only get an IP address from DHCP on BOOT and with the mixer booting faster than the router it was failing to do that. With a static IP set in the mixer, it's fine.
This router actually being specced for the US follows the FCC requirements (I'm not totally sure the TotoLink one did) for power output as well as having much smaller antennas, so the range is reduced drastically just from that, not to mention the non-ideal arrangement.
I'm just shy of being able to leave the building and still be connected to 5GHz, so a couple hundred feet with walls and vehicles in between, and even at the point where 5GHz drops the 2.4GHz is still strong. I do need to range test in an open field but I'm confident.
Worst case scenario... I found that you can get Aerohaive HiveAP 121s for suspiciously cheap (I paid $11) on ebay, so I'm going to experiment with the possibility of supplementing the TP-Link router with that in rough situations. I figure there's no harm in painting it black and sticking it on a speaker stand.
Hopefully this helps someone at some point I don't know. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it should work.
