WiFi Jedi.com

I recently had a customer that wanted to disable the 802.11d flag (setting) on their Motorola/Symbol handheld scanners.    Even when my customer disabled that setting manually, it came back upon reboot.  Apparently they were using Wavelink’s Avalanche system to centrally manage the scanners, which would download a fresh configuration each time it was powered up (including re-setting the 802.11d flag).

In this post, I will explain the research I conducted as well as two possible solutions.  First, here is a little background on 802.11d taken from Wikipedia:

802.11d, is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 specification that adds support for “additional regulatory domains”. This support includes the addition of a country information element to beacons, probe requests, and probe responses. The country information elements simplifies the creation of 802.11 wireless access points and client devices that meet the different regulations enforced in various parts of the world.

The current 802.11 standard defines operation in only a few regulatory domains (countries). This supplement adds the requirements and definitions necessary to allow 802.11 WLAN equipment to operate in markets not served by the current standard. Enable the 802.11d feature/option if you are operating in one of these “additional regulatory domains”.

At any rate, I ran the issue with the 802.11d flag to ground.  These are the steps I took:

I found the 802.11d flag is a radio level setting specific to the handheld device – in this case, the Symbol/Motorola scanners.

Therefore, I tried to figure out if we could disable the 802.11d through Wavelink’s Avalanche tool.  I found the following Q&A on their support forum (and called into their tech support this morning to verify):

Q: Can you disable the 802.11d radio file through The AMC product?
A: No. This is a symbol radio file and we do not have the tools in our mobility center to disable specific radio files. These need to be disabled manually.

Then, I tried to figure out if there was a way to disable the setting centrally from Motorola.  I believe you can do this through Motorola’s MSP (Mobility Services Platform).  For reference, here are instructions to disable 802.11d through MSP: http://support.symbol.com/support/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=11407&sliceId=SAL_Public&dialogID=107746501&stateId=1%200%20107736747

Therefore, we had to disable the 802.11d setting in each device manually and keep it disabled through a cold boot.