i recently bought the GL.iNet Slate Plus (GL-A1300) to surf securely in public wifi networks (e.g. hotels). So far i have been using a D-Link DAP-1330 with Openwrt and IPsec, which has always worked well. However, it doesn’t support 5ghz wifi and since i also wanted to switch to Wireguard, it was time for an upgrade
I like GL.iNet’s products and the idea of using Openwrt as the basis for its own and very simple user interface. Yesterday i was able to use it for the first time in the hotel. However, i was quickly disappointed when i realized that the hotel wifi couldn´t be found. My other devices (Android and IOS) found it and were also able to connect to it. At home i had set up everything beforehand (wifi name, wireguard, etc.) and updated it to v4.4.6. The GL-A1300 was connected to my home wifi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) as a repeater, which worked without any problems.
After a quick search, i found old threads from an MT300N-V2 that has exactly the same problem!
I tried a few things to solve the problem, but unfortunately i couldn’t do it. I even reset the router to factory settings to rule out any incorrect configuration on my part. I have documented all steps with screenshots, but this forum doesn´t allow me to attach more than one screenshot here…
First i did a normal search via the admin interface, but i noticed that the wifi i wanted (scandic_easy) was not found. Then i tried searching only in 2.4ghz or 5ghz mode, but unfortunately i had no luck here either.
To investigate further, i connected with ssh and ran iwinfo wlan0 scan and iwinfo wlan1 scan. The wifi was actually found! But only in the 5ghz band:
Now that i knew that the GL-A1300 could find the network, i tried using Luci. I used “join network” and added it. I found it strange that the bssid of scandic_easy is the same as that of GL-A1300-652-5G and not the one shown in the scan. After successfully applying the change, i restarted the router. Unfortunately, it was still not possible to connect to the hotel wifi. The ‘sta’ interface was also missing in /etc/config/wireless.
The last thing i tried was to establish a connection manually via the admin interface (GL.iNet) using the bssid (from the scan), but this didn’t work either.
Does anyone else have an idea or a solution? Otherwise the router is unfortunately unusable for me
Now I have a GL-AR750S, stay in Hilton hotel. Hotel wifi i “Hilton Honors”. There’s no problem at all finding its wifi, and connect to it. Maybe the problem happens to certain hotels, not all of them. Gl.inet does have to do some research, and fix this problem to its products. But seems like its engineers didn’t encounter the same situation, and no plan to fix it.
Thanks for the hint about the DFS channels!
However, i absolutely don’t understand why it doesn’t support them, as it is explicitly sold as a travel router… This makes it useless for me, because i don’t want to have to deal with the configuration using Luci in hotels. Too bad, but i’m returning it.
If you are in EU or US and many other countries you have to have Dynamic Frequency Selection on special channels. If you are in Philippines, you need no DFS at all.
It’s not about bypassing DFS, but that it is not possible to connect to a network that uses DFS channels with the GL-A1300 via the Admin Portal. This has been intentionally removed by GL.iNet:
Especially when traveling, where every network is different, i need to have a repeater with the highest possible compatibility.
