Something like that, yes. I'll hold back on my hunting until I can again ssh into my N800 though.. too much work to do that from the device itself.

I have the same problem with my n810
I cannot use ch 12 or ch 13

If I use the airmon-ng the radio work ok an I can see the ap on ch 12

I check how the wifi module is loaded and after the insmod the init script call a utility named wlan-cal (/mnt/initfs/usr/bin/wlan-cal)

This wlan-cal do the job of reading from some place (private nokia data) and set the wireless parameters
It you rmmod the wifi module cx3110x.ko and the umac.ko and put it back with insmod you can see in wireless manager the ap on ch 12 or 13but you cannot connect on it

You must call the wlan-cal to make the wifi work again but you will lose the 12 and 13 ch

A modified wlan-cal to witch don't use the nokia stored value for the regulatory domain will do the job

I have a similar issue.

Just a thought; if someone without the problem could tar up their /etc, doing a diff between the two directories could be a help. I'm not sure what information might be kept in /etc on the N800 (I got mine 3 days ago), but there shouldn't be anything personal.

Regardless, a fresh working copy of /etc would probably be easiest to work with.

updated:
To do this, you could just enter "tar -czf /media/mmc1/etc.tgz /etc" (assuming you have a card in your external slot), and from there do anything you want to with the file.

Well, I just did it on my (not-European) device; it was 200kb total, so it's pretty small.

http://filebin.ca/kyypfv/etc.tgz

I got that problem when i was traveling in France back in April. I couldn't connect my N800xOS2008 to a lot of WiFi hot spots!
I think that WiFi channels bug should be fixed by Nokia

I'd be willing to bet that somehow wlancond or something that wlancond talks to reads this out of the same "hidden" NAND partition that holds the WLAN MAC address and the lock code and other data that persists between reflashes. My reasoning is that my tarball of Debian does not use wlancond and lets me choose all channels up to 13. If you want me to do any testing, just ask.

-John

has wlancond been stripped, if not, can someone use strace (or the preload hack) to see what files it might open?