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I lost the antennas to my dual-band wifi router (2.4G/5G). Do I risk damaging the router if I install 2.4G antennas?

jackson.c
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That depends on your router. The issue is that when you design an RF power amplifier (such as the one on the output side of your router), you generally design the thing to put out as much power as you can. In doing so, if you don't put in extra effort -- and component cost -- it's easy to design a final amplifier that would be damaged by the sort of impedance mismatch you'd see using the wrong antenna.

So -- either your router manufacturer made the choice to make the router robust in the face of an impedance mismatch, or they didn't.

This Stackexchange doesn't encourage questions about specific products, so to answer your question fully you need to either find a forum that does and ask there, or just try your antennas and see what happens (knowing that you may find out by damaging your router), or try to find correct replacement antennas.

TimWescott
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    In my personal opinion, if you're not going to use the router, ever, because you can't find the right antennas, then you may as well slap those 2.4GHz antennas on and give it a try. Either it works and you have a useful one-band router, or it doesn't work and -- assuming you have the money -- you can throw it away and get a new one. – TimWescott Dec 05 '22 at 16:45