How can I turn off Wi-Fi localisation on the Pi 3 B+?

Question

I have the Pi 3 B+ and wanted to know if there was any way to turn of the need for the Wi-Fi localisation as when travelling around different countries and using my Pi as an access point I have keep changing it, whereas on the old Pi 3 B there was need to include this additional step? Hopefully someone may know what needs to be changed in order to stop the Pi from checking?

Answer 1

You can simply disable the wifi-country service with:

rpi3+ ~$ sudo systemctl disable wifi-country.service

But when I enable the service again it has no effect. systemctl status wifi-country.service tells me Wi-Fi is disabled because the country is not set but WiFi is always working. Seems to be a bug but that shouldn't matter you.

Answer 2

This is purely speculation on my part, but the Foundation states "WiFi is disabled until wireless regulatory domain is set (Pi 3 B+ only)".

I assume this is a condition of WiFi certification.

On the Pi3 the WiFi was restricted to channels 1-11, unless a suitable wireless regulatory domain is set. This satisfied all domains, even the FCC, because these channels are permitted in all jurisdictions.

Unfortunately there is NO 5GHz band or set of channels which are universally supported, and many administrations have a number of other restrictions to minimise interference.

I would have suggested disable wifi-country.service, as suggested. This effectively just runs /usr/lib/raspberrypi-sys-mods/wifi-country which is a simple script to check /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to see if a country is specified.

I can't see anything which would actually check what country you are actually in, but as the nearest country is a 4 hour flight away I am not in a position to try.

I did try setting my country to GB and my WiFi (2.4GHz) works.

You problem may be simply selecting a regulatory domain which does not match the surrounding WiFi networks. The regulatory domain definitely does affect how the on-board WiFi chip operates.