All the current wifi chipsets require binary blobs. They are considered part of the hardware, they are running on the hardware, not on your cpu, they just aren'

All the current wifi chipsets require binary blobs. They are considered part of the hardware, they are running on the hardware, not on your cpu, they just aren't shipped on an EPROM, but the driver is loading it at init time. The channel visibility is regulatory thing; if you see only channels 1-12 you have set it for North America, most of the world can use 1-13, and Japan also 14 (for 802.11b only).