Under what circumstances will I lose the ability to choose any country I want for my RB411/R52n-M radio?

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Under what circumstances will I lose the ability to choose any country I want for my RB411/R52n-M radio?

The only reason I ask is that I have heard that the US FCC regulations don’t allow the setting of any country anymore, so, I suspect that a later (or current?) router firmware upgrade might wipe out the choice.

You might ask why I care, and I can’t really answer that as I don’t like to lose anything with an update, and I don’t ever need the latest software anyway, but at the same time, I think the US FCC regulations are just fine since my radio is talking to my own access points which only understand US frequencies anyway.

Plus US EIRP power seems to be the highest in the world anyway, isn’t it?

Still, I’d like to know BEFORE it happens, exactly what causes me to LOSE the choice of any country I want.
Hence I ask the simple question here of:
Q: Under what circumstances will I lose the ability to choose any country I want for my RB411/R52n-M radio?

Asking for a simple and very basic understanding of USA FCC license given there are hundreds of countries in the options
2

The obvious one for start, don’t change anything (i.e. upgrade) and you can’t lose anything. But even if you do upgrade, there’s no way of telling where in the world your device is, so you’d have to voluntarily install some special locked down for US firmware (if such was made by MikroTik), and that can’t happen by accident.

3

You can’t lose this ability.
Only if your device was already manufactured as a US-ONLY device, then you don’t have these choices.

4

You can use the locker tool for that I guess.

5

Thanks. It’s not obvious that this is the answer since it would seem to be completely in software (firmware) that the country settings are.
That the settings “can” be overwritten is a given (since it’s in software and that means anything is possible).

That Mikrotik has a policy to not overwrite the country settings is fine.
Thanks!

Locker tool?

A search for “mikrotik locker tool” comes up blank (lots of hits, but nothing related).
https://www.bing.com/search?q=locker+tool+mikrotik

What’s a “locker tool”?

6

If you WANT to lock the country, you can do it with a special package, available to distributors. If you want, you can ask support@mikrotik.com to make one for you.

7

Actually its name is lockpack creator and is available to distributors.
Ask your distributor for providing you a package you need or ask mikrotik directly if they will enable that option for your account.

8

Thanks for that answer because I had searched and didn’t find what the “locker” tool was.
I don’t WANT to lock down the country; I just don’t want to LOSE any options by doing something stupid (like upgrading the firmware).
Thanks for the clarification.

Thanks for the clarification on the name of the tool.
The LAST thing I want to do is lock the country down; but I can see why a distributor who needs to stay within local regulations might want to do that.

9

Because he needs to fulfil the regulations…?

10

We agree.

Overall, it seems the following is the factual situation:

  1. Apparently, under NEW FCC rules (nobody knows when they took effect though), the country has to be locked down in the USA to the USA.
  2. There is an option of overriding the country by setting “country = no country” and “tx-power = default”, which allows the maximum transmit power stored in the EEPROM.

NOTE that I have no intention, nor any need, to change the country settings; I just don’t want to lose any options that I already have by doing something stupid (like updating the firmeware without knowing what it will change).