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

I've been building a certification intelligence tool for hardware teams (markready.io) and needed a good test lab directory. The FCC publishes accreditation data through a Socrata API but it's pretty bare - names, addresses, designation numbers, and expiration dates that are often years stale. No websites, no capabilities, nothing to tell you whether a lab is a two-person shop or an Intertek subsidiary.

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.

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.)

> The core proposal bans all labs in China and Hong Kong, extending the "Bad Labs" rule the FCC adopted in May 2025. A broader proposal would also cut off labs in any country without a Mutual Recognition Agreement with the US, which adds 5 more labs (4 in India, 1 in Switzerland). Total at risk: 131 labs, 22.2% of the global total.

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.

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.