The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all • Hacker News Board

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#21

Post by c-c-c-c-c » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

chambertime wrote: post #10

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #7

This article completely omits a section on when external accreditation. For many products you can get CE marking or similar with in-house testing.

Yeah, this article is really focused on FCC certification. But to your point, there are other sections on the site that are focused on CE certification and how to navigate getting certified so you can sell throughout the world.

Yes thats evidently clear but you usually don’t need external accreditation if you do in house testing and keep a compliance file for the product, this applies for both the US and EU.

In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#22

Post by chambertime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #16

This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. 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…

Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers.

I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#23

Post by iamnothere » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #19

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd wager Baofeng is the most common emergency radio. Baofeng or something equivalent is what people in the 3rd world have largely been able to actually afford and there in the rough that's actually what's being used. I recall Baofengish radios being the most commonly spotted ones in the Syrian Civil War.

Early on they were spotted in the Ukranian conflict as well, before everyone got proper radios.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#24

Post by chambertime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

daemonologist wrote: post #4

gchamonlive wrote: post #3

Why is OPs comment on his own work that hit first page flagged and dead? Is it repeating info from the article?

Probably because it appears to have been written by an LLM (the post too, but I assume comments are more easily killed by flags (?)). (To be clear I did not flag it myself.)

Clank clank, beep boop. You should walk to the car wash since its only 30m away ;)

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#25

Post by crote » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #7

This article completely omits a section on when external accreditation. For many products you can get CE marking or similar with in-house testing.

As far as I can tell, this distinction is mostly meaningless in practice.

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?

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#26

Post by skeeter2020 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

chambertime wrote: post #22

Aurornis wrote: post #16

This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. 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…

Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers. I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.

the headline hints that there's some sort of non-obvious factor that's going to be revealled. I scrolled past countless redundant and information-sparse graph-like figures and never found it; moved on.

If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#27

Post by chambertime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #21

chambertime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this article is really focused on FCC certification. But to your point, there are other sections on the site that are focused on CE certification and how to navigate getting certified so you can sell throughout the world.

Yes thats evidently clear but you usually don’t need external accreditation if you do in house testing and keep a compliance file for the product, this applies for both the US and EU. In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.

Well there's a bit more to it than that. It depends on if you're making an intentional radiator. I have another flow chart on the site that helps you figure out if you need to send your device to a testing lab or not.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#28

Post by mh- » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #16

This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. 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…

Is that why the pie chart colors don't match the colors in the legend at all..?

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#29

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

chambertime wrote: post #22

Aurornis wrote: post #16

This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. 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…

Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers. I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.

> thought they were visually helpful in this instance

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.

Re: The FCC is about to ban 21% of its test labs today. I mapped them all

#30

Post by chambertime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

skeeter2020 wrote: post #26

chambertime wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers. I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.

the headline hints that there's some sort of non-obvious factor that's going to be revealled. I scrolled past countless redundant and information-sparse graph-like figures and never found it; moved on. If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.

Well I couldn't find any other thorough dataset on this topic, so in that sense this is non-obvious since it took weeks to assemble the information. And it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique.