Travel router

My most recent job was at a hotel, where connecting to the Wi-Fi wasn’t really a privacy issue thanks to daily MAC address randomization and a general employee password (it’s not tied to any individual). You’d just walk in, and it works. But as a total nerd, I couldn’t resist overcomplicating things by getting a travel router.

When I was checking OpenWrt hardware table at a break I saw that a TP-Link WR802N is supported. Every hardware revision of it except the v3 one is or was supported at some point. Naturally I decided to look for used ones just for the sake of it, then I saw a listing for the latest v4 one for really cheap. I called the seller and we both negotiated on a price good for both of us, so my overcomplicating work Wi-Fi situation started here.

Before continuing any further, I’d like to put the hardware I got onto the table.

The box contents for this thing are insane for 2025: it has a USB cable, Ethernet cable, and an ADAPTER. In the year 2025, with companies even hesitating to give a USB cable to charge your device, this is insane.

I took a look at the TP-Link firmware, but I lost the screenshots. It’s nothing interesting actually. It’s the re-skinned version of the TP-Link web interface that’s been there for years, at least since 2008. Also, as far as I remember, the stock firmware doesn’t have WireGuard support. So I went on to install OpenWrt. I followed this video, but since I was on Windows, I used tftpd64 instead of Pumpkin.

Installation went pretty smoothly and I went from stock OS to LuCI in a few minutes. But oh boy, that was the easiest part. The real challenge is configuring OpenWrt, and I was pretty rusty because I last touched it in 2021.

I quickly went to the interfaces and edited the default AP to my liking -oh, also, the device now supports WPA3 too, something that stock firmware couldn’t even dream of. Then I set up the router to connect to my home Wi-Fi as a client (like any phone or laptop would). Everything worked fine: the travel router grabbed an internet connection from my main Wi-Fi and shared it out through its own private Wi-Fi network. I could browse the web without any issues. Perfect! I packed it up and headed to work.

At the hotel, I plugged the router into my power bank, turned it on, and waited for my personal Wi-Fi hotspot to appear… but nothing showed up. I rebooted it—still nothing.

Here’s what was going on: OpenWrt is dumb. If it can’t find the Wi-Fi network you told it to connect to (in my case, my main Wi-Fi), it disables your Wi-Fi hotspot completely. It won’t let you broadcast your own network unless it’s successfully connected to the upstream one.

So if you’re moving between locations and the saved Wi-Fi isn’t available, your own network vanishes until you fix it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! I learned that the hard way.

If you want to have an AP even if the configured AP not available you can either,

• Delete Wi-Fi connection before leaving the location (not practical)
• Using a random script that’s like a decade old from OpenWrt forums (incompatible)
• Install Travelmate package (works great)
  

Travelmate offers a somewhat decent interface to scan APs and allows you to select one from the list. It also keeps credentials for the APs you have connected to, so when you visit different locations, it automatically connects to the proper network. If it doesn’t see any of the previously configured networks or fails to connect to one after a timeout, it removes it from interfaces so your AP starts working again—you can connect and fix the issue. All in all, it’s an awesome improvement for OpenWrt and it truly makes your device a travel router.

There’s a big catch though: this device has only one radio and it’s a MediaTek one. That means with OpenWrt it can’t really search Wi-Fi points while broadcasting a Wi-Fi AP itself (I don’t know how Keenetic, Cudy, or TP-Link’s stock firmware does that, OpenWrt just can’t). That makes connecting this device to a Wi-Fi network a test of patience and determination, and also a torture.

The torture part is: you can start Wi-Fi network search from the travelmate menu and boom! Your hotspot is gone and now your phone is clueless. After like 20 seconds your hotspot appears again, so you connect again, but LuCI times out, so all you have is now an empty box that’s supposed to have a Wi-Fi network list. So you rescan again, this time hoping to reconnect in time to see the list. That second attempt usually works, but not always. Though if you finally succeed in connecting, it’s very stable.

You might be saying, “Well, how about the captive portals? Your router doesn’t have a browser and a screen—how do you log in?” Well, it just pops up on the first device that connects to your router. Also, if it’s a known captive portal, travelmate supposedly caches the credentials so you don’t ever see it again (that didn’t work for me).

After that, you can just connect to your very own hotspot and any device that connects to it gets access to the internet!

Best part is, if the place only allows one device per person, you can easily circumvent that with this method.

I ran the device for 5 hours and it was pretty stable. No issues and it has great range for some reason. I tried connecting 2 devices at most, but it can easily do more than that.

This device in particular is also very energy efficient as mentioned in the OpenWrt device page. It barely got anything from my powerbank in 5 hours.

Downsides

Well, of course this device in particular comes with its own downsides and limitations. The biggest one is it’s got 8 MB flash. You can’t really put a lot of things there. Sure, you can add things like travelmate and WireGuard packages, but that’s pretty much it. You don’t have a lot of space to play in this device—most of it is already taken by the OS. The Tailscale package itself is like 5 MB, so it doesn’t fit in the device, and that’s a big bummer for me because I use it for connecting my devices together. Another note: on-device ad blocking is pretty much useless because most of the blocklists are 3-4 MB and they don’t fit in the limited space. You can use public Mullvad or AdGuard DNS over HTTPS servers for that purpose, but if you’re into control, it’s a no-go with this device.

Second issue is having one radio, this causes the previous problems I’ve mentioned in the Wi-Fi scanning and hotspot disappearing while not seeing the previously configured Wi-Fi connection.

Next issue: it doesn’t have a USB port, so you can’t connect a 3G/4G modem or your smartphone—this device is strictly reserved for WISP and Ethernet connections. I later found out that TP-Link also makes models with USB and Wi-Fi 5 which are also compatible with OpenWrt.

Last issue is micro USB. Seriously, TP-Link? You guys revised this device in 2024 and decided to go with micro USB again? Come on, having USB-C literally costs nothing since like 2017—adopt it.

Overall hardware is pretty poor, but considering this TL-WR802N can be found for around 350–500 Turkish Liras, it’s alright for what it is.

At home?

I mean, this device won’t be your primary router at home, of course—hardware is pretty weak for that. It’s suitable for IoT devices and if you have a small blind spot, though. Keep in mind that this thing only has a 100 Mbps LAN port and Wi-Fi 4 2.4 GHz only at the end of the day.

From a software standpoint, it runs OpenWrt really well and stable, so I guess it’ll do a mesh or extender with another OpenWrt router flawlessly.

All in all…

Having your very own private network wherever you go is a cool idea. With OpenWrt, possibilities are pretty much endless (well, as long as it fits in the 8 MB flash space). First thing that comes to mind is connecting to a VPN server and using it as an easy VPN connection box. Another thing is adding DPI bypass to circumvent censorship or ad blocking via DNS over TLS, but as I mentioned before, this device is not enough to give you very granular control. Whatever you do, it’ll be a bit rough around the edges.

At the end of the day, I liked the concept of travel routers. I even added a WireGuard connection and anything that connects to this automatically gets tunneled through my VPS. But as I mentioned before, this device feels pretty limited for me, so I decided to sell it. What will come next? That’ll be another post’s subject.