how to patch your ram-download firmware image to allow more channels

[Pavel Roskin]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Achilleas Kotsis wrote:

> Tested on Prism2 PCMCIA Card, firmware 1.7.1, works like a charm.
> Thank you very much, we live in Greece and have many Prism FCC cards with 11
> channels, Greece follows ETSI regulations (13 channels).
> If you have any suggestions in patching Windows drivers or flash firmware,
> they would be most welcome.

You should change two word in the PDA - regulatory domain and allowed
channels.  HostAP doesn't allow dumping PDA yet, so you can get
linux-wlan-ng (http://www.linux-wlan.com/) and use prism2dl
(http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/prism2dl/) to dump PDA using the "-g"
option.

The find the like that has 0x0103 in the second position and change the
number in the fourth position (which is normally 0x0010 - FCC) to 0x0030 -
ETSI.  The line that has 0x0104 in the second position should have 0x1fff
in the third position - it means that channels 1-13 are allowed.

For my card, the diff would be following:

$ diff before after
7,8c7,8
< 0x0007, 0x0103, 0x0001, 0x0010, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0x0000,
< 0x0002, 0x0104, 0x07ff,
---
> 0x0007, 0x0103, 0x0001, 0x0030, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0x0000,
> 0x0002, 0x0104, 0x1fff,

Flash the PDA using prism2dl.  You may also need to flash secondary
firmware unless you are going to always use downloadable firmware.

I don't know about Windows, but this page may be helpful:
http://www.frars.org.uk/cgi-bin/render.pl?pageid=1109

Still, it's better to preserve your PDA and just patch it than to
overwrite it completely.  If you can dump your PDA, try finding those
numbers and changing them.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin