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Comment by Joel_Mckay | Hacker News Reader

It also immediately invalidates FCC modular component compliance, and may be illegal if operating on dual-use bands like 5G wifi.

Remember the rules limits use the ERP, and EEs may have added a crappy antenna on purpose to meet the legal limits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_radiated_power

There are also medical radiofrequency exposure guidelines, and they mitigate deep tissue burns or "G5 Mind control beams" concerns. lol =3

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-risks...

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You can just ignore the FCC.

They are completely toothless.

As an individual this is mostly true unless you're touching broadcasting proper. As a business this is absolutely not true and noncompliance is a ticking time bomb that will bankrupt you.

As someone in Southern California who uses HAM, this is both true and not true. There's an older gentleman who has already spent time in jail for sitting on frequencies without a license repeatedly. After he got out, he jumped right back on it. He's got tens of thousands if not more in unpaid fines, but as far as I'm aware they cant get blood from a stone.

Another anecdote, dozen or more years ago a friend had a fault cable modem that was spitting out radio traffic I assume on some important frequencies in a dense area. They got a knock on the door from an FCC team who were tracking the interference down.

HAM-is-not-ham

And your example must be one of those weirdos on 80m. What a pack of crazies.

The author is German and lists German contact information. They're a lot stricter in the EU about this.

Exactly… they would have added crappy antenna as they likely meet emission, spurious or harmonics requirements..

Engineer might be messing with other 2.4GHz devices by doing this

2.4GHz is already incredibly crowded and prone to interference (in urban environments). I remember once picking up emissions on a Bluetooth headset from a leaky microwave oven.

This seems very unlikely compared to the obvious answer that they added a crappy antenna to keep their BoM and assembly costs low.

The radios on these are weak and adding an Omni antenna is exceptionally unlikely to violate EIRP.

Could this design accidentally radiate something it's picking up from the board outside of 2.4ghz? Sure.

But practically it's quite unlikely to in this context.

That isn't how this works. There is no change in emission power, the antenna doesn't add power.

Well mostly true.

You can replace an inefficient (turns power into heat) antenna with a more efficient antenna which will then radiate more.

And some frequencies are regulated by effective radiated power, where they basically care about the strength of the signal in the strongest location, so a more directional antenna could push you over the limit.

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