WLAN / Wifi connection keeps falling back to APIPA

[Flx68]

Hi all,

I've got the following problem:
Whenever I flash a fresh Recalbox image to mi Raspberry Pi 4s SD card the Wifi setup works perfectly fine and I'm able to get a stable Wifi connection (SMB share is reachable, scraping works etc.). But every time after the first shutdown or reboot (I use the safe ways of shutting down eg. via the main menu or the ssh command "poweroff", I do not just pull the power), when I boot my Pi again and go into the Wifi menu, it shows as "connected" but my IP address is an APIPA address (169.254.XXX.XXX).

When I disable and re-enable the Wifi, it seems to connect successfully and the menu shows an IPv6 address, but it does not really connect.
Scraping will not work, the Pi is not pingable from other network devices and when I then go back into the Wifi settings menu, it shows the APIPA address again.

I tried resetting the Wifi configuration via the menu and also via recalbox.conf, to set the SSID and password manually via recalbox.conf, I tried establishing a connection via WPS and I set my Wifi region to DE (I live in Germany). Nothing helped and sadly it is not possible for me to connect my Pi via LAN cable.

I would greatly appreciate, if somebody could help me with my issue, as flashing a fresh image every time I need a working Wifi connection isn't really an attractive solution...

Thx in advance!

My setup:
Board model: Raspberry Pi 4 B (4GB RAM)
Recalbox version (build) : 8.0.2
Hardware (Micro SD, Power Supply, etc.): 64GB Sandisk EVO Plus Micro SD as only drive, original RPi4 USB-C PSU

[Alvin]

@flx68
Because you mentioned it, I'm sure you know what APIPA is.
APIPA is chosen when the Device (in this time it must be the Raspberry) didn't find a DHCP Server.

So is your Router switched On, is DHCP active in your Router and is the Raspberry always in range of your WLAN ?
Did you use 2,4 Ghz or 5 Ghz WLAN ?
What kind of WLAN-Router did you use ?
You live in Germany, so maybe it's a FritzBox ?

I think you know this, but to be sure, this is what the Recalbox-Wiki has to say about WLAN:
https://wiki.recalbox.com/en/tutorials/network/wifi/enable-wifi
and
https://wiki.recalbox.com/en/tutorials/network/wifi/wifi-country-code