I have this awesome little travel router from GL.iNet, the GL-MT-3000 Beryl AX

For the most part it works great, they run OpenWRT with GL-iNets web-ui for management.

I noticed after plugging in a USB3 that the 2.4GHz wifi would disappear. After some investigation and a post on the GL-iNet forums, I was directed to a research paper by Intel showing that usb3 does and can cause interference to 2.4GHz radios.

For info about the USB3 2.4Ghz interference check here

Here’s a dmesg output from when I plugged the usb drive in.

[ 316.221804] exFAT-fs (sda1): bogus allocation bitmap size(need : 119283, cur : 119357)
[ 324.549270] 7981@C08L1,BcnCheck() 2437: nobcn occurs within 5 sec for band 0 (ra0)!!
[ 329.759881] 7981@C08L1,BcnCheck() 2437: nobcn occurs within 10 sec for band 0 (ra0)!!
[ 334.966608] 7981@C08L1,BcnCheck() 2437: nobcn occurs within 15 sec for band 0 (ra0)!!
[ 340.173418] 7981@C08L1,BcnCheck() 2437: nobcn occurs within 20 sec for band 0 (ra0)!!
[ 345.380318] 7981@C03L1,MtCmdFwLog2Host() 3417: N9(WM) (ret = 0)
[ 350.582976] 7981@C08L2,BcnCheck() 2408: nobcn still occur within 30 sec for band 0 (ra0)!!

unplug usb drive, 2.4ghz starts working again

[ 381.787062] 7981@C08L2,BcnCheck() 2408: nobcn still occur within 60 sec for band 0 (ra0)!!
[ 396.027138] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, device number 4
[ 397.390703] 7981@C08L2,BcnCheck() 2433: bcn recover for band 0 (ra0)!!

On the forum someone replied that they put copper tape around the USB drive connector. and it fixed the interference.

So I decided to take it one step further and open the router and put copper tape on the usb port itself.

and it worked!

I can now have 2.4GHz wifi and USB3 drive in the USB3 port!