Hi all,
I'm sharing this info in case other communities outside of Newport Wireless Mesh may find it useful. The Aruba AP175 is a high-power, stable, electrically protected outdoor access point that I recently ported to OpenWrt, and I hope other communities might get good use out of it. It's old hardware, but very available, and for multiple reasons will likely enjoy long-term supportability (ath9k, 128M RAM / 16M NOR).
Newport Wireless Mesh will continue to use Aruba AP175s that I have personally flashed.
Van Tech Corner (THANK YOU, VAN!) did a video explaining how, given an Aruba AP175 in unknown state, we can use a Raspberry Pi or CH341A and 16-pin Pomona chip clip to reflash the Aruba AP175 to a custom U-Boot compatible with OpenWrt 23 and onwards: