Contact Chip Makers?

[danshev]

@jeremymcgee73, have you considered contacting sales teams at other HaLow chip makers?

Considering the recent surge in interest in your project (and sales being driven to Morse Micro), it might be worth the couple of minutes it would take ...?

For example, Newracom and TaiXin offer HaLow SoCs (NRC7292 and TXW8301, respectively), but neither has mainline OpenWrt 24.10 support (and this project currently only targets patching the Morse Micro MM6108).

I realize it'd a bit of a long-shot, but -- just maybe -- having sales leads at these companies aware of this community / the MANET-based demand for their HaLow chips might enable them to press their dev teams to invest in mainline OpenWrt 24.10 support, which would make it much easier to bring them into the fold of OpenMANET, ya?

[jeremymcgee73]

Yeah that has been a problem. No one else has a pi compatible board that can do 27dbm. This is because it's based on the Quectel FGH100m-h. Most of the other boards are 21DBM. This other Alfa board may be a better option. But, one thing to note is that there is a file called the BCF, which controls the power output of the board. A lot of manufacturers do not want that file to be public. I have tested the current build with another manufacturer. But, they don't want this file public. The BCF is also tied to firmware versions, we are currently on 1.14.1.

https://www.quectel.com/product/wi-fi-halow-fgh100m-h/

https://www.alfa.com.tw/products/ahpi6108d

[morse-zandr]

I'm not sure what you mean by "not public" here.

I'm on the Open Source Platform team at Morse Micro, and one of my primary projects is getting as many BCFs into the morse-firmware repo as possible.
We aren't able to let the public edit them, because it's trivial to make a device violate regulatory limits by changing that file. But trust me when I say we are tweaking every bit of performance we can out of them. There's no reason for us to leave Tx power on the table if we can meet regulatory limits as well as SEM and EVM.

BCFs are sort-of tied to firmware, but for the MM6108, we have some backward compatibility in newer firmware with those BCFs. That format does change from time to time, but as of now those BCFs from 1.14 will work with 1.15.x and at least 1.16 when it releases.

[jeremymcgee73]

I realize the BCF isn't and shouldn't be able to be modified. But, I'm not sure wasn't clear in my post, what I mean by not being public is that a lot of boards BCFs aren't available for public release. Silex and Alfa come to mind. There really isn't a great alternative to the Seeed boards.

[zandr]

OK, we're on the same page. I'm certainly pushing our module partners to get BCFs published in our GitHub repo, for exactly this reason.

[morse-zandr]

We're working on 24.10 support, keep an eye on https://github.com/MorseMicro/morse-feed