As expected this is an attack on China-sourced electronics.
I hope this isn’t the start of a return to the Bad Times when many niche electronics were simply unavailable at any price, and what was available was $1K+ for what should be commodity gear.
What the FCC does is important, but there needs to be a sense of proportionality. I am a ham radio user but I am not particularly bothered if my $30 DVD player has a few spurious emissions, as long as they aren’t egregious. I also don’t mind imperfect but cheap radios like Baofengs if they help get people into the hobby. It’s good to have a box of these to hand out in emergency situations! Can’t do that with Yaesus unless you’re made of money.
I'm bothered when my neighbors turn on their christmas lights, and the whole 40 meter band is wiped out.
Also baofengs are horrible all those regards:
* spurious emissions (thus banned in quite a few countries) * useless in most emergencies (but preppers somehow buy them for some reason... probably due to youtubers shilling for them) * handing them out to whom exactly? You need a ham radio licence to use them, and i'm pretty sure every licenced ham has a radio and doesn't need handouts from others (unless we're talking about baofeng FRS/PMR radios, but somehow preppers never buy those)
Also a yaesu ft65 costs around 100eur over here, you don't have to be made of money to afford a much better radio.
Where I’m at a Baofeng can hit the local repeaters just fine. I handed them out to my family when we had a major multiday communication outage (cellular and internet were down) and set them up to listen to the repeater. I told them if there’s a life threatening emergency they can transmit. It made everyone feel a little safer.
While I personally have a better radio, they are great as cheap backups.
Of course initially, expecting the same quality and low price will likely be an issue. But over time it gets better is probably the idea. Will it actually happen, who can say? But I can understand the idea they have here. I'm not saying they'll be successful. Definitely not saying I agree with it. (There are far more effective ways to accomplish a manufacturing ramp up with far less risk.) But I get the idea.
Maybe the FCC lab rules ought to be more selective, allowing consumer goods but not commercial/industrial goods at these labs.
Alternatively, maybe we can subsidize the consumer. What I don’t want to see is everything becoming 10x more expensive or completely unavailable at home while the rest of the world gets to keep the status quo.
In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.
When done just for this purpose, it can be done much more cheaply than at a proper lab, because you do not need very accurate results.
Most people are going to want to sell their products on an international market, which essentially means designing and testing it to the strictest rules any country uses and just having to do a whole bunch of paperwork for the rest: getting a lab to do both FCC and CE is not significantly more expensive than either one on its own. And because FCC requires external testing, that means doing external testing.
Besides, although CE is technically a self-declaration that you follow the relevant rules, it still requires you to be able to demonstrate that you follow those rules - which means you have to test and report on a level comparable to an external lab, which means building a testing lab with a price tag comparable to a very nice home, and doing all the annoying paperwork like having your equipment regularly tested and calibrated. You are allowed to do it in-house, but is it worth it?
This move is being executed too broadly, in my opinion, but the “bad labs” problem especially in China is widely known in the industry. If you spend any time in the electronics industry at smaller companies you will encounter people who know Chinese labs that will give your product passing test results every time as long as you’re not so far past the limits that it’s too obvious.
I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.
If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.
What is that?
There's great coverage of it at https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...
It's actually also now a base capability in the Hermes agent and has been really helpful for me, at least.
If you're the author, can you comment on whether you used AI to write this? (Specifically, the text.)
Where it might be suffering is in its presentation of a list of facts unorganised around any thesis. It took me until your China Question section to see the meat of your piece.
If I had to suggest some edits, they would be making everything above that section more concise (by reducing the number of charts and/or moving them to footnotes) and adding a summarising subtitle.
There are also jargon jumps, e.g. from TFAB to TCB. (I initially assumed the FAA was a TCB, the latter being a generic international term.) This compounds the lack of conciseness presented by the accredition-body breakdown and TCBs vc. test-only labs sections. If those sections were moved after your thesis section, you could dive into whether China's labs differ from the U.S. labs in those respects.
And really, you can't tell. Nobody can tell. Humans write badly and blandly also. It's just a trope at this point.
No, you're comment is an LLM.
But you can tell it to use different styles. To be formal or in-formal, to insert colloquialisms or to remove.
People are depending on their own 'gut-sense' a lot, and not realizing they are really not correct.
If you think all it takes is paying attention, then you are missing it. It's both more widely used than assumed, and also now obscuring what is non-AI.
If you personally can't tell then just say that rather than casting aspersions on everyone else by claiming they can't.
I did not FCC certify my product because the primary focus is for the European market but now I would also have to consider costs.
chambertime•1h ago
The first thing I did was build an LLM-maintained wiki about the hardware certification universe - FCC rule parts, equipment authorization types, test standards, the TCB system, international equivalents, all of it. About 30 pages of structured knowledge that Claude could reference when doing the actual enrichment work. Then I ran a loop of subagents over multiple days to enrich the labs - pulling from the Socrata API, cross-referencing TCB registrations to see which labs can certify (not just test), hitting Google Places for websites and coordinates, crawling accreditation body directories to figure out which labs are actually still active. The FCC's own expiration dates are useless for this - tons of labs show 2022 or 2023 dates but are clearly still operating. Claude synthesized the descriptions and capabilities from all the scraped data into structured records, using the wiki as context.
The directory is at markready.io/labs. You can browse by country, US state, and TCB status.
Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong. Not just the government-controlled ones they banned last year - all of them. 21% of the global total gone. 27 of those 126 are Western firms (Intertek, SGS, TUV, UL) operating China offices. I wrote up the full impact analysis at markready.io/blog/fcc-bad-labs-vote.
Full disclosure: I've never actually gotten a device through FCC certification myself. I've been building RF hardware since I was a kid but always on the hobby side. What pulled me into this was the data problem - the FCC publishes all this information but nobody had stitched it together into anything usable, and it felt like a genuinely interesting dataset to enrich and a real gap in understanding the hardware product space.
Built with Next.js + Cloudflare. The enriched dataset covers 28 countries.
JumpCrisscross•29m ago
Does this increase or decrease demand for your tool? Less fragmentation would be expected to decrease demand from insiders. But more regulatory scrutiny would raise the stakes for outsiders getting it wrong.