Ok, that made no difference at all. I can still see 15 other SSIDs, but not my own, usually on channel 13.
(As before, the SSID works fine on the same Pi 3’s onboard networking in Rune Audio, from my laptop under Linux, under MacOS, iOS, Android 4.xx-7.xx, Windows 7 etc. with an assortment of wireless interfaces- so I’m pretty confident that the router isn’t totally broken.)
I threw an AP up on channel 6 via my phone, it could see that, but apparently failed to connect to it, when I gave it the password, I got the notification in the web interface that wireless had been restarted but wireless suddenly showed as “off”.
However, the web interface was just a bit screwed up and not accurately reflecting the state of the networking settings, as ifconfig showing wlan0 to have an ip:
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr b8:27:eb:0a:2c:85
inet addr:192.168.43.38 Bcast:192.168.43.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:390 errors:0 dropped:382 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:31 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:140601 (137.3 KiB) TX bytes:7241 (7.0 KiB)
I unplugged eth0 and went to wlan0’s ip on my phone (as it’d be the only thing with a route to the interface) and got the familiar Volumio front end. I replugged eth0 and reloaded the page in my desktop browser (which will be going via eth0) and it showed the wireless as connected- but only the wireless. I shift-ctrl-r reloaded the page, and could see both eth0 and wlan0 in the web interface.
So it looks like there’s more than one issue at play- it can’t find my router on channel 13 to save its life (and that’s the quietest place for my router to be), and also the web interface doesn’t always correctly reflect the status of the networking, which can lead to drawing bad conclusions.
Incidentally, a pox on nano- you’d be amazed how many times I typed “:wq” before I remembered that I was using it 