Jeff King [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
|On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 11:05:59 -0800, Todd Boyle wrote:
|>Let me see if I understand this right. The FCC has issued
|>regulations,
|>presumably conforming to US legislation, that vendors can provide
|>external connectors but only if they are proprietary?
|
|Yes, although not clear to me what "proprietary' means considering some of
|them you can mail order from DigiKey. Also, just about everyone I have seen
|has a standard PCB footprint, so if the "proprietary' connector bothers you,
|just unsolder it and put a standard one on (<5 15.23).
There is a problem with this, and it does at least slightly support Todd's
concern. Some (many?) vendors claim that the FCC takes the position that
15.23 does not apply to modifications of (or composite systems created from)
components that were certified. Few people have the facilities required to
truly "home build" 802.11 gear from scratch. Some vendors go further and
claim that the requirement that a Part 15 intentional radiator be used only
with an antenna with which it has been certified voids 15.23 entirely since
a home-built device will have been certified with no antenna.
Now, I may have a skewed perspective, but my recollection is that Part 15
operation was originally available to everyone. Then we got type acceptance
because of massive rules abuses on the part of the vendors, importers, and
manufacturers--not because of users tinkering too much. The wording of what
was then analogous to 15.23 (I don't remember if it was the same section) made
it clear that type acceptance was not intended to reserve Part 15 operation
for commercial products only. Eventually type acceptance was replaced with
certification, and somewhere along the way "use" was added to some lists of
activities requiring certification along with manufacture/import/sale. So
restrictions that once were supposed to protect us from commercial abuses have
to some extent been reversed to give commercial concerns more control over the
public's use of the public's unlicensed spectrum. Clearly this is advantageous
to vendors who can charge a significant markup on a commodity antenna by adding
it (under their own name) to their list of certified configurations. In effect,
vendors are getting many of the customer-control advantages of licensed services
without themselves having to do as much paperwork (or pay recurring fees).
Dan Lanciani
ddl@danlan.*com
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