You are going overboard. What you are referring to was used for illegal AM radio station broadcasting which was apparently a big thing 30 years ago.
The FCC deals with this stuff all the time. The reason for country codes is because they don't want interference with aircraft. The point you missed is that it's easy to find a transmitter and when you do, you have the force of the law behind you. Obviously, you START with a polite request to correct the problem. Unfortunately, these days too many people figure "I don't need to listen to nothing or nobody" so it's important to have the law behind you. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tomas Kuchta Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2026 6:09 AM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Unable to connect to wifi due to 802.11d - flapping wifi regulatory domain You do realize tha one of the probable scenario is that the AP was not set to BR in US, but migrated here with the owner. No? In the unlikely event that FCC would act on my complain - they could come acompanied by the dark, masked force. There could be very high human cost to this, eg. Broken family(s), abandoned property, lost livelihood, ..... I do not know how to locate the AP set to BR. In that case, I think that the human thing to do, is to hard set my clients to US and try remembering ro unset the when I travel. -T On Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 08:18 Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote: > You should report this to the FCC if you can find the AP, since it's > illegal for someone in the US to set a wifi unit to any regulatory > domain than the US. > > I definitely would find the owner of the wifi unit and inform them, > and if they were resistant to fixing it, I would have the FCC explain it to > them. > > Ted > > -----Original Message----- > From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Tomas Kuchta > Sent: Monday, July 20, 2026 9:43 PM > To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> > Subject: [PLUG] Unable to connect to wifi due to 802.11d - flapping > wifi regulatory domain > > This is an interesting, dare I say exotic, wifi failure mode, at least > to me. > > I was unable to connect to wifi at home today, and also unable to add > anothe AP connection. > > This did not make any sense to me - so, I spent some time looking into it. > I eventually, connected the laptop to ethernet - I asked Claude Fable, > if it could figure it out. > > After some loose ends, me being very, very specific, rejecting bunch > of explanations with data - it comes down to this: > > There is nerby AP, set in BR regulatory domain (Wi-Fi > frequencies/channels) broadcasting BR countey code. This caused my > laptop's wifi flapping between US and BR regulatory domains via > 802.11d. So, my wifi saw my US AP picking its AP object Id , by the > time NM got to connect, the wifi card swithed to BR frequencies/channels and > the AP object Id was gone. > So, it was timing issue realy. > > Solution: sudo iw reg set US. > > I do not think that I have enough experience to have figured this out > myself. I checked the diagnosis - journalctl supports it as well as > google search for NM error message: "The access point > /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/AccessPoint/NNN was not in the scan list." > > I thought, this is worth sharing, not for AI, but as an interesting > networking issue. > > -Tom > >
