Switching Wifi Regions Fix and Question

[Dandaman46]

I found my NanoPi Neo Air's could not list or connect to some wifi networks. Some investigating found this was because channel 12/13 are disabled by default.

Nothing in runtime had any effect on the output of iw reg get as it should have.

Patching in some firmware fixes worked for me.

 

wget http://ftp.be.debian.org/pub/software/network/wireless-regdb/wireless-regdb-2025.02.20.tar.xz
tar xf wireless-regdb-2025.02.20.tar.xz
sudo cp wireless-regdb-2025.02.20/regulatory.db /lib/firmware/
sudo cp wireless-regdb-2025.02.20/regulatory.db.p7s /lib/firmware/
sudo iw reg set AU #Australia

I can now connect to wifi channel 13.

Now for my question:

I read in this old thread that armbian-firmware-full is required for wifi. would that mean that the full firmware package is desirable for the Nanopi Neo Air?
When running apt-get install armbian-firmware-full it states it will consume an additional 1gb of disk space. Hardly desirable for a little device.

VERSION
v25.5.1 for NanoPi Air running Armbian Linux 6.12.30-current-sunxi

 

[laibsch]

The way I understand it is that you only need the full firmware package in a few exceptional circumstances.  What is the wifi chipset on your SBC?

 

Do you have the wireless-regdb package installed?  "dpkg -l wireless-regdb"