Apparently my N800 won't connect to Wi-Fi hot spots using channels 12 or 13. Those two channels are not used in North America but are used in large areas of the world, including Europe and South America. Can channels 12 and 13 be enabled on the N800?

See this thread, particularly post #15.

Following that post #15, I coded as root:

echo 0x30 > /sys/devices/platform/wlan-omap/default_country

Now when I cat that file I get this output:

Regulatory domain: 0x30

It does appear to show the required change (previous setting was 0x10).

However, in the thread you have linked, some posts ( > #15) suggest that changes to the /sys/..../default_country file will not make the desired change in the kernel. I particularly note post #19 by TA-t3, who is usually pretty reliable.

Unfortunately, I am not able to test this for myself. My various routers and wireless cards have hardware limitations that prevent use of channel 12 or 13.

Should the cat output be considered a success?

Ok, so that part at least works.

It does, but not in a permanent way and the userland bits may not be automatically updated. You may have to restart wlancond, and you may have to give it a different $OSSO_PRODUCT_WLAN_CHANNEL in the environment (the default value comes from the cal partition via /usr/bin/osso-product-info).

iw reg set JP

Many thanks for your detailed reply. To get things straight in my head, and to help users who might now be at the stage that I was myself a few months ago, I hope you won't mind my taking the reply piece by piece.

The value reverts to 0x10 on reboot. Resetting it to 0x30 is no trouble, if that will enable access to wifi.

Translation: as root,
When I code
echo $OSSO_PRODUCT_WLAN_CHANNEL
I get an empty line in reply. The same, whether wifi is connected or not, and whether or not I have reset the default_country. Fixing a value would appear to restrict the channel selection rather than open it up. On the other hand, maybe the empty value signifies the default channels 1-11, in which case fixing a value of 12 or 13 might help.

So, when I'm next in Europe (June 2011), if N800 won't connect to wifi after the default_country has been reset and wlancond restarted, I'll try the effect of
or 13 if that still doesn't work. I'll report the results, if I can find this thread again afterwards.

It would be really nice to hear back from LinuxStation and anyone else who has faced this problem, to learn what they tried and what success they had.

Until I saw this thread, I assumed that N-type routers were the problem and that there was therefore no solution for a non-N device.

Um .... what OS are you running on your N800? There was a project a couple of years ago (stlc45xx) with some top-level developers working to create a mac80211 driver for OS2008. It was abandoned in November 2009, without getting beyond the alpha stage.

If you have got iw to work on the N800, please give details of how you did it.

I have not yet properly tried any method to enable channels 12, 13, 14 on N800. I am very disappointed with Nokia for not making this job easier. Surely they know that many tablet owners travel globally and need all the channels. Even my fairly large, only somewhat portable HP laptop can use all 14 channels while running Windows 7 or Mandriva Linux.

I'm ready to "jump ship" and switch to another tablet. If anyone knows of another tablet that can use the full set of WiFi channels, do let me know about it.

Yesterday I was looking on ebay.co.uk for another N800 that presumably would use 13 channels. Would having a European N800 in hand help our effort to make 13 channels available?

Hm, I don't think that's normal. What does /usr/bin/osso-product-info say?

The value is the regulatory domain rather than a specific channel, it should be 'ETSI/EU' for Europe (at least that's what it defaults to on mine). Then again strings(1) shows no reference to any OSSO_* variables in /usr/sbin/wlancond so that may be irrelevant.

It turns out that this variable can have different values in the Root shell and the non-Root shell. I was root when it echoed an empty value. In the non-Root shell, it echoes 'FCC/US' until I change it manually.

A value set manually in the Root shell persists until I exit, and then it reverts to empty.

A value set manually in the non-Root shell persists until I close the Terminal window, even if I switch between Root and non-Root shells in the mean time.

If I open a second Terminal window, it does not echo the value set manually in the first one, but echoes 'FCC/US' in the non-Root shell (whether or not the first window is still open).


Run as root, the output includes the following line:
This does not change if the environmental variable OSSO_PRODUCT_WLAN_CHANNEL is given a different value, or if CALOSSO_PRODUCT_WLAN_CHANNEL is given a different value (in either shell).

(The reason for trying CALOSSO_etc is that the osso-product-info output includes the following line when the executable is run as non-root:
and the output does not mention OSSO_PRODUCT_WLAN_CHANNEL without the "CAL".)

If OSSO_PRODUCT_WLAN_CHANNEL is important for this problem, it looks as though the WLAN connection will have to be made via command line, in the non-Root shell. Maybe it won't be important, and the problem will be solved by changing /sys/devices/platform/wlan-omap/default_country, perhaps also restarting wlancond.

(I am a bit suspicious of waking up wlancond. There is a long thread of N900 users complaining that their wlancond causes the available channels to default from time to time, blocking off the channels we are trying to open up.)

@LinuxStation - Glad to see that you are still around. Are you willing to try the effect of coding (as root):
echo 0x30 > /sys/devices/platform/wlan-omap/default_country

and, if that doesn't help on its own, following it up with:
? (Sorry I didn't put the first command in a "Code" box. It looks better when it is all on one line, and the "Code" box puts it on two.)

The old thread had a number of hopeful suggestions, but nobody ever reported whether or not any of them worked.