• Using the FCC ID of your device to find out useful information about it

    Ever wondered what you can do with that little model label on the back of your home network equipment? In this article I want to show you a quick few things on how that little label can be useful. By grabbing that little number off the label and going to the FCC OET Equipment Authorization Search site, you can pull up valuable information such as which channel your router broadcasts with the highest transmit power. You can also see internal photos which would help you identify chipset and features. Let's see an example.

    Let's say you have a Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH high power gigabit router and you've ran inSSIDer, but it's inconclusive what channel out of 1, 6, and 11 might work best for you, this is where the FCC site may come in handy, let's look.



    Take your FCC ID and go to the FCC site. Notice you have to do a little weird formatting in this case, just try out different input options until it works.



    Then under the Details you can find useful items such as the switch chipset, the wireless chipset, and the FCC test report. The FCC test report, snippet shown below, is where you can find things like transmit power on certain channels. in this case you can see the WZR-HP-G300NH has the most transmit power for wireless-n on channel 6.



    Whether this will actually help you improve range and throughput will have to be left to your own testing as it may not do a darn thing for you as shown in this SmallNetBuilder article, but it does give you more tools to examine your network and options to test.