[pdabbadabba]

> And as much as I appreciate spectrum partitioning, we really need to get the major wifi chipsets completely reverse engineered so we can blow away this ambiguous spectre of "unauthorized" modifications and turn them into something normal. Randos stomping on ch12-15 isn't an actual problem - but that widespread rulebreaking coupled with the unknown of what further mods could do is scary to regulators. Destroy that unknown.

There was a lot of resistance to allowing unlicensed use of 5.25-5.35 GHz and 5.47-5.725 GHz precisely because some were afraid that unauthorized modifications would be commonplace, and devices could not be relied upon to sense and avoid the RADAR systems that also operate in those bands. So bear in mind that the more you insist on modifying, the harder it will be to persuade the FCC to open up new unlicensed bands.

[Alupis]

Curious why we have home devices run on the same band as airport radar systems and what-not.

Seems here the original regulation was the problem, not people modding their home routers.

[pdabbadabba]

The answer is pretty simple: we are desperately in need for more spectrum (at least in urban areas), licensed and unlicensed, for wireless internet traffic. And there really are no unused bands that can simply be reallocated for this purpose without dealing with the users already in the band.

Although airport RADARs sound like a poor choice of a service to share spectrum with, they have the benefit of being stationary, not very numerous, and typically located far from the urban cores where the spectrum is needed most.

[mariuolo]

Can a single modified home router actually cause disturbance to a RADAR?

Or are we talking about a widespread use of such devices?

[tankenmate]

Short range radar no, long range yes. The problem with using those frequencies (for WiFi) are that they are very useful for radar, they reflect off rain drops very well and propagate in the clear very well.