It should probably be noted changing the regulatory region of an RF device may result in you using illegal frequencies in your area depending on the combination of which region you're in and which region you're setting it to.
Are you sure? According to wiki, there are plenty allowed 5GHz channels in Turkey.
Pretty, yeah. Doesn't the same wiki page list a bunch of not-allowed 5Ghz channels too? Or only allowed ones?
I didn't mean to claim it's completely banned, but some channels are, which leads to some hardware makers to just eschew the entire 5Ghz stuff instead of just specific channels, like what this submission is about.
A TV is indeed typically a client. Or station, if you want to dust off your CWNA certificate. One should still include the warning when sharing such projects/advice because of considerations like:
- With no explanations or warnings, the reader may very reasonably apply the same type of fix across several of their badly preconfigured devices. Now when they extend their Windows laptop display wirelessly to the TV over Miracast (a direct exchange this TV supports), both devices will agree they can do so on the bands in whatever region they were set to.
- It's not safe to assume only the AP needs and has a correct regulatory db or regulatory domain set. APs for the wrong region are sold/imported, do not always have correct regulatory dbs, and can also be similarly misconfigured. Clients can also peer to peer or hotspot. In general, you should fairly be warned you're removing one of the 2 sides to the safety system and "the channel I wanted appeared" is not the same thing as "I fixed the buggy channel config on the device".
- As some have pointed out, clients can perform either an active or passive scan based on, basically, what the system feels makes the most sense at the time. An active scan will result in probes across the supported channel list, so even if all of the above is true, people should be aware even a lone station can still transmit on all of the bands it is told to support.
I'm not against fixing buggy devices but I am against telling people the fix is to set it to Germany without warning they may result in using illegal frequencies in your area if not carefully considered. A muuuch cooler & safer fix might have been to patch the supported channel list for the given country to be correct rather than patch the region to be wrong, but that may have been harder to pull off.
With some chipsets it can end up being entirely ass-backwards - if you use an Intel WiFi chipset, a nearby AP can broadcast the wrong region and cripple your connectivity.
Outdated regulatory databases and firmware efforts by vendors have generally made both illegal and legal usage beyond ch 1-12 at 2.4GHz rather difficult.
BTW, I'm someone that use to by US region coded 802.11b wifi devices to get the 13th channel. Except for exploring, it was rarely useful since none of my other devices could connect on it.
Which could still be illegal, but I don't think anyone will realistically investigate a low-power device sending a few packets occasionally.