[Battlemesh] What hardware still works?

[fboehm]

Am 01.03.2016 um 17:25 schrieb Antonio Quartulli:
> On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 03:09:16PM +0200, Jonathan Morton wrote:
>> In PCs, the wireless radio is typically on a daughtercard which is certified separately - even when it’s a softmac like ath9k, and the retail product in question is a complete motherboard or even laptop with “integrated wifi”.  Obviously, you can easily change the software drivers on a PC, including putting in a replacement regulatory database (or simply changing the regulatory-domain setting), but somehow that doesn’t invalidate the entire PC’s certification.
>
> Are you 100% sure that this does not invalidate the *new* FCC regulation? As far
> as I understood, then vendor/provider of the final product is responsible for
> making sure that the user can't violate any regulation.
>
> If this was true, couldn't a router manufacturer buy a "certified" wifi chip and
> then keep the rest open like it before? This would have required way less engineering
> effort given that on the router itself there was nothing to change.
>
> On top of that, does your statement mean that any wifi router being sold with a
> daughter wifi card does not need to be "certified per se" but it only requires
> the daughter board to be certified ?
>
>
> I have the suspect that with the new "weird and generic" rules it is not so easy
> :( But please, tell me I am wrong.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
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Here in Europe it's rather simple. The manufacturer or importer is 
responsible for the certification. If you are the person/company that 
takes an embedded system, adds a wifi card and resell it, you are 
considered the manufacturer of this system and have to certify the 
product as one piece.

If you sell both pieces separately to a customer and he is responsible 
for assembling the product, you might not even have to certify the 
wireless radio. Because it's finally the responsibility of the person 
who assembles/builds the product. Which would be a privat person (the 
end-user) in this example.

Of course in this example the privat person is responsible that this 
product does no harm to other electronic products (and persons).

As soon as you change the firmware the certification is gone. So why do 
you care about it?

Firmware can change all the essential stuff that a certification process 
is verifying:
- Transmission power
- Channels
- Spurious emissions
- Radar detection (within 5GHz)

In the US things might be slightly different. But not that much 
according to my knowledge.

Franz