Please post complaints, as of my latest build I'm getting the link drops as well.

Simply remove network-manager and use wpa_supplicant.  I have close to 60 tinkers now and zero drops using wpa_supplicant.

Interesting, do you know why?  This does not seem to be a problem on kernel 4.4...

We dealt with this problem for quite a long time.  It started out on tinkeros which prompted us to try armbian... which didn't work any better.  I worked with an asus engineer who determined that the disconnects were because of network-manager scanning for a better connection.  While the problem is likely not network-manager itself and rather how the drivers handle it, there are a few work arounds.  Asus suggested setting the bssid which we tried and it did not help.  There is also a patched version of network-manager called network-manager-noscan which supposedly fixed this problem.  I never tried it.  We switched to wpa_supplicant and have 100% success staying connected.  We don't want the end users messing with the network-manager settings anyway which show up in the task manager by default.   Read the section in the link below titled "Regular network disconnects, latency and lost packets (WiFi)"

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NetworkManager

Ok, the 4.4 uses a newer driver than mainline, that may explain it.  It also used a newer version than Asus for some time, that is not the case now however.