4 ms·

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

129 points by chambertime 5mo ago

chambertime 5mo ago
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.
- doctorpangloss 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - chambertime 5mo ago
    That uncomfortable feeling when someone calls you an LLM...
  - Supermancho 5mo ago
    *guidelines
  - kevin42 5mo ago
    At this point I wish it were against the rules to accuse people or complain about articles as written by LLMs. It's creating so much noise that useful commentary is hard to find. I don't see any signs of the parent comment being written by an LLM other than it's detailed and well-written.
  - jjk166 5mo ago
    This doesn't come across as LLMish at all to me.
  - cootsnuck 5mo ago
    Their comment does not give off "LLM-written" really... It drives forwards actual points without superfluous segments. I don't think it's helpful to try and discredit people whenever we want by throwing around accusations of "LLM-written".
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong Does this increase or decrease demand for your tool? Less fragmentation would be expected to decrease demand from insiders. But more regulatory scrutiny would raise the stakes for outsiders getting it wrong.
gchamonlive 5mo ago
Why is OPs comment on his own work that hit first page flagged and dead? Is it repeating info from the article?
- daemonologist 5mo ago
  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.)
  - chambertime 5mo ago
    Clank clank, beep boop. You should walk to the car wash since its only 30m away ;)
  - gchamonlive 5mo ago
    It's unflagged and undead now, so probably not because of that but a mistake? And the comment is coming for our brains too
iamnothere 5mo ago
> 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.
- chambertime 5mo ago
  73 fellow ham radio operator!
- ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
  > 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. I'm bothered when my neighbors turn on their christmas lights, and the whole 40 meter band is wiped out. Also baofengs are horrible all those regards: * spurious emissions (thus banned in quite a few countries) * useless in most emergencies (but preppers somehow buy them for some reason... probably due to youtubers shilling for them) * handing them out to whom exactly? You need a ham radio licence to use them, and i'm pretty sure every licenced ham has a radio and doesn't need handouts from others (unless we're talking about baofeng FRS/PMR radios, but somehow preppers never buy those) Also a yaesu ft65 costs around 100eur over here, you don't have to be made of money to afford a much better radio.
c-c-c-c-c 5mo ago
This article completely omits a section on when external accreditation. For many products you can get CE marking or similar with in-house testing.
- chambertime 5mo ago
  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.
  - c-c-c-c-c 5mo ago
    Yes thats evidently clear but you usually don’t need external accreditation if you do in house testing and keep a compliance file for the product, this applies for both the US and EU. In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.
    - chambertime 5mo ago
      Well there's a bit more to it than that. It depends on if you're making an intentional radiator. I have another flow chart on the site that helps you figure out if you need to send your device to a testing lab or not.
    - adrian_b 5mo ago
      In-house EMC testing is practically always required before you go to an external lab, unless you want to waste a lot of money by discovering at the lab that your device cannot be certified. When done just for this purpose, it can be done much more cheaply than at a proper lab, because you do not need very accurate results.
- crote 5mo ago
  As far as I can tell, this distinction is mostly meaningless in practice. Most people are going to want to sell their products on an international market, which essentially means designing and testing it to the strictest rules any country uses and just having to do a whole bunch of paperwork for the rest: getting a lab to do both FCC and CE is not significantly more expensive than either one on its own. And because FCC requires external testing, that means doing external testing. Besides, although CE is technically a self-declaration that you follow the relevant rules, it still requires you to be able to demonstrate that you follow those rules - which means you have to test and report on a level comparable to an external lab, which means building a testing lab with a price tag comparable to a very nice home, and doing all the annoying paperwork like having your equipment regularly tested and calibrated. You are allowed to do it in-house, but is it worth it?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Aurornis 5mo ago
This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. This move is being executed too broadly, in my opinion, but the “bad labs” problem especially in China is widely known in the industry. If you spend any time in the electronics industry at smaller companies you will encounter people who know Chinese labs that will give your product passing test results every time as long as you’re not so far past the limits that it’s too obvious.
- chambertime 5mo ago
  Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers. I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.
  - skeeter2020 5mo ago
    the headline hints that there's some sort of non-obvious factor that's going to be revealled. I scrolled past countless redundant and information-sparse graph-like figures and never found it; moved on. If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.
    - chambertime 5mo ago
      Well I couldn't find any other thorough dataset on this topic, so in that sense this is non-obvious since it took weeks to assemble the information. And it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique What is that?
        chambertime 5mo ago
sschueller 5mo ago
This will make testing more expensive and hence some will no longer bother to FCC test excluding the US from receiving their product. Especially small companies and startups. I did not FCC certify my product because the primary focus is for the European market but now I would also have to consider costs.
- chambertime 5mo ago
  This is a valid concern. For the time being I'd expect Taiwanese labs to be a price comparable alternative, but this is a likely outcome.
WarmWash 5mo ago
I have first hand experience with this. It may look like a politically motivated move, but in the RF industry when you need something to pass, China is known to be much friendlier/lax than other labs. For those who don't know, the point of these labs is to generate certified test results. The lab's job is to certify that the test was done correctly with calibrated test equipment. They then give you the results which you then give to the regulating body. However, you are the one who knows your product and how it operates. You are present in the lab, in the room, doing the testing with them. This introduces a lot of grey area where a lab may or may not go along with what you say. Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands, and they know you probably have many other products that need certifying. It's mutually beneficial for them to be lax.
- jitler 5mo ago
  > Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands, Are the engineering firms going to Chinese labs because of their rubber stamp approval or because the process is “tens of thousands” as opposed to “hundreds of thousands”?
  - WarmWash 5mo ago
    It's cheaper and they are friendlier. They don't rubber stamp, the tests are still done, but if you are struggling to get over a .5dB hurdle they will "work with you" to snuff it out. The tests can be 100+ parameters and every single one is a hard binary pass/fail. So a mouse fart over the line on one test and you are not compliant. Go home, re-engineer, hope you fixed the issue (it's basically impossible to test for without a full dedicated RF testing chamber), and pay for a whole new testing run. This is where the Chinese labs come in to play, as upon seeing your .5dB issue, they may feel that maybe their antenna placement was slightly off, or maybe you say that actually the "center of noise" (a bs thing) on your product is 5cm away from the testing center point, and move it back from the antenna with a wink and a nod. In western labs the people are just as friendly, but that antenna is definitely in the right spot, and your product goes in the same spot as everyone elses. However you need to go to China to do all this. If you are big megacorp with huge resources, western labs are fine. If you are smaller and possibly will become insolvent if you cannot pass testing, China is the play.
johnea 5mo ago
Aside from the majority of comments being related to whether or not the article is LLM generated 8-/ There still remains the question of the US de-certifying Chinese FCC approval labs. It's not like the US has the strictest radio requirements on products, in fact, it's close to the opposite. Both asia and europe have much stricter emissions and sensitivity requirements. But the big question to me, is what do they intend to do about the overwhelming majority of US consumed electronics being built in China? The idea of abandoning chinese manufacturing is a delusion. It would take decades. The idea that we do the "really advanced, complicated" manufacturing in the US, and let the Chinese build the "simple" stuff is even more delusional. China has the most advanced manufacturing tech, and the greatest scale of manufacturing in the world, by far. By very very far. Sure, the US could catch up, assuming they stop banning Chinese cars and other advanced products and instead start importing and learning from them. All of this delusional thinking goes back to one common source: elect a clown, expect a circus...

129 points by chambertime 5mo ago

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.

doctorpangloss 5mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- chambertime 5mo ago
  That uncomfortable feeling when someone calls you an LLM...
- Supermancho 5mo ago
  *guidelines
- kevin42 5mo ago
  At this point I wish it were against the rules to accuse people or complain about articles as written by LLMs. It's creating so much noise that useful commentary is hard to find. I don't see any signs of the parent comment being written by an LLM other than it's detailed and well-written.
- jjk166 5mo ago
  This doesn't come across as LLMish at all to me.
- cootsnuck 5mo ago
  Their comment does not give off "LLM-written" really... It drives forwards actual points without superfluous segments. I don't think it's helpful to try and discredit people whenever we want by throwing around accusations of "LLM-written".
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Today's an interesting day to launch this because the FCC is voting to ban all 126 test labs in China and Hong Kong Does this increase or decrease demand for your tool? Less fragmentation would be expected to decrease demand from insiders. But more regulatory scrutiny would raise the stakes for outsiders getting it wrong.

gchamonlive 5mo ago

Why is OPs comment on his own work that hit first page flagged and dead? Is it repeating info from the article?

daemonologist 5mo ago
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.)
- chambertime 5mo ago
  Clank clank, beep boop. You should walk to the car wash since its only 30m away ;)
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
  It's unflagged and undead now, so probably not because of that but a mistake? And the comment is coming for our brains too

iamnothere 5mo ago

> 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.

chambertime 5mo ago
73 fellow ham radio operator!
ajsnigrutin 5mo ago
> 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. I'm bothered when my neighbors turn on their christmas lights, and the whole 40 meter band is wiped out. Also baofengs are horrible all those regards: * spurious emissions (thus banned in quite a few countries) * useless in most emergencies (but preppers somehow buy them for some reason... probably due to youtubers shilling for them) * handing them out to whom exactly? You need a ham radio licence to use them, and i'm pretty sure every licenced ham has a radio and doesn't need handouts from others (unless we're talking about baofeng FRS/PMR radios, but somehow preppers never buy those) Also a yaesu ft65 costs around 100eur over here, you don't have to be made of money to afford a much better radio.

c-c-c-c-c 5mo ago

This article completely omits a section on when external accreditation. For many products you can get CE marking or similar with in-house testing.

chambertime 5mo ago
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.
- c-c-c-c-c 5mo ago
  Yes thats evidently clear but you usually don’t need external accreditation if you do in house testing and keep a compliance file for the product, this applies for both the US and EU. In-house emc testing is quite fun and you dont need much more than a spectrum analyzer, antenna and E/H-field probes.
  - chambertime 5mo ago
    Well there's a bit more to it than that. It depends on if you're making an intentional radiator. I have another flow chart on the site that helps you figure out if you need to send your device to a testing lab or not.
  - adrian_b 5mo ago
    In-house EMC testing is practically always required before you go to an external lab, unless you want to waste a lot of money by discovering at the lab that your device cannot be certified. When done just for this purpose, it can be done much more cheaply than at a proper lab, because you do not need very accurate results.
crote 5mo ago
As far as I can tell, this distinction is mostly meaningless in practice. Most people are going to want to sell their products on an international market, which essentially means designing and testing it to the strictest rules any country uses and just having to do a whole bunch of paperwork for the rest: getting a lab to do both FCC and CE is not significantly more expensive than either one on its own. And because FCC requires external testing, that means doing external testing. Besides, although CE is technically a self-declaration that you follow the relevant rules, it still requires you to be able to demonstrate that you follow those rules - which means you have to test and report on a level comparable to an external lab, which means building a testing lab with a price tag comparable to a very nice home, and doing all the annoying paperwork like having your equipment regularly tested and calibrated. You are allowed to do it in-house, but is it worth it?

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Aurornis 5mo ago

This article is excessively LLM written to the point that there’s barely any real information in between all of the unnecessary pie charts and repeated points. This move is being executed too broadly, in my opinion, but the “bad labs” problem especially in China is widely known in the industry. If you spend any time in the electronics industry at smaller companies you will encounter people who know Chinese labs that will give your product passing test results every time as long as you’re not so far past the limits that it’s too obvious.

chambertime 5mo ago
Thanks for that insight on how the Chinese labs are perceived amongst hardware engineers. I know pie charts are decisive. I thought they were visually helpful in this instance.
- skeeter2020 5mo ago
  the headline hints that there's some sort of non-obvious factor that's going to be revealled. I scrolled past countless redundant and information-sparse graph-like figures and never found it; moved on. If you've only got a paragraph worth of information to share, say it and let us get on with our lives.
  - chambertime 5mo ago
    Well I couldn't find any other thorough dataset on this topic, so in that sense this is non-obvious since it took weeks to assemble the information. And it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > it was fun doing it using the LLM Wiki technique What is that?
      - chambertime 5mo ago

sschueller 5mo ago

This will make testing more expensive and hence some will no longer bother to FCC test excluding the US from receiving their product. Especially small companies and startups. I did not FCC certify my product because the primary focus is for the European market but now I would also have to consider costs.

chambertime 5mo ago
This is a valid concern. For the time being I'd expect Taiwanese labs to be a price comparable alternative, but this is a likely outcome.

WarmWash 5mo ago

I have first hand experience with this. It may look like a politically motivated move, but in the RF industry when you need something to pass, China is known to be much friendlier/lax than other labs. For those who don't know, the point of these labs is to generate certified test results. The lab's job is to certify that the test was done correctly with calibrated test equipment. They then give you the results which you then give to the regulating body. However, you are the one who knows your product and how it operates. You are present in the lab, in the room, doing the testing with them. This introduces a lot of grey area where a lab may or may not go along with what you say. Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands, and they know you probably have many other products that need certifying. It's mutually beneficial for them to be lax.

jitler 5mo ago
> Chinese labs are known for just going along with it. After all, you are the one paying them tens of thousands, Are the engineering firms going to Chinese labs because of their rubber stamp approval or because the process is “tens of thousands” as opposed to “hundreds of thousands”?
- WarmWash 5mo ago
  It's cheaper and they are friendlier. They don't rubber stamp, the tests are still done, but if you are struggling to get over a .5dB hurdle they will "work with you" to snuff it out. The tests can be 100+ parameters and every single one is a hard binary pass/fail. So a mouse fart over the line on one test and you are not compliant. Go home, re-engineer, hope you fixed the issue (it's basically impossible to test for without a full dedicated RF testing chamber), and pay for a whole new testing run. This is where the Chinese labs come in to play, as upon seeing your .5dB issue, they may feel that maybe their antenna placement was slightly off, or maybe you say that actually the "center of noise" (a bs thing) on your product is 5cm away from the testing center point, and move it back from the antenna with a wink and a nod. In western labs the people are just as friendly, but that antenna is definitely in the right spot, and your product goes in the same spot as everyone elses. However you need to go to China to do all this. If you are big megacorp with huge resources, western labs are fine. If you are smaller and possibly will become insolvent if you cannot pass testing, China is the play.

johnea 5mo ago

Aside from the majority of comments being related to whether or not the article is LLM generated 8-/ There still remains the question of the US de-certifying Chinese FCC approval labs. It's not like the US has the strictest radio requirements on products, in fact, it's close to the opposite. Both asia and europe have much stricter emissions and sensitivity requirements. But the big question to me, is what do they intend to do about the overwhelming majority of US consumed electronics being built in China? The idea of abandoning chinese manufacturing is a delusion. It would take decades. The idea that we do the "really advanced, complicated" manufacturing in the US, and let the Chinese build the "simple" stuff is even more delusional. China has the most advanced manufacturing tech, and the greatest scale of manufacturing in the world, by far. By very very far. Sure, the US could catch up, assuming they stop banning Chinese cars and other advanced products and instead start importing and learning from them. All of this delusional thinking goes back to one common source: elect a clown, expect a circus...