A DAB/Internet radio (made by Karcher in Germany) broadcasts an SSID (details). It cannot be disabled and neither the SSID nor the MAC address can be changed.
Can someone explain why this is necessary?
Usually for initial setup. Many applicances will have your phone join that network to apply the permanent wifi details.
The fact that it would continue to may just be shoddy design.
So IIUC, you’re saying it’s for a phone to configure the appliance? The reason being that the appliance’s UI is not convenient enough, I presume?
In the case at hand, the Karcher DAB radio has no iOS or AOS app. So AFAICT it would only be feasible if the radio also had a built-in web server and a captive portal. But I get no captive portal when connecting.
I suppose another theory is that if the radio has a cloud uplink, perhaps it would then push a captive portal to redirect to a centralised server which then remotely configures the device. I would not trust it enough to give it an uplink so I can’t test this theory.
Ummm… does it? It depends on Wi-Fi for operation, so why would it have another Wi-Fi radio to relay the signal? Other than initial setup of course.
