Raspberry Pi Zero W with WiFi Dongle for external antenna

[philgood]

In wanting to have the least amount of coax loss, I want to place my Raspberry Pi Zero W and FlightAware receiver as close to the antenna as possible. This means having an external WiFi antenna on the metal outdoor cabinet located on my roof. It also means that I want to disable the on-board WiFi and only use the external Wifi. With what I find on-line, (see below) I want to use rfkill yes in piaware-config to disable the on-board WiFi.

Now either rfkill, kills all WiFi on the Raspberry Pi, both on-board and external or I just don’t seem to have the correct external WiFi dongle. I purchased a Mideatek RT5370N as it says it is Linux compatible, so I was hoping it was plug-n-pray.

I hope someone has already solved this so I can get my receiver back on-line. Thanks!

@david.baker

With rfkill on, piaware’s boot system will look for any connected wifi USB adapters and setup with the same ssid and password you have in your piaware configuration on the wifi adapter.

[obj]

Try to get the dongle working first without rfkill, but I suspect that chipset is not supported out of the box. The piaware sdcard image rfkill option will specifically only inhibit wifi interfaces with a Broadcom or Pi Foundation MAC.