How to manually remove wifi & bluetooth chips from Librem 13v4?

Hardware
1

I should have ordered airgapped, but I did not so the chips are there.

I don’t want to rely just on the kill switches.

Can someone tell me where the wifi & bluetooth chips are and how I can remove them?

Are there ANY OTHER CHIPS that SEND OUT / RECEIVE signals to/from the outside world? How can I remove those too?

2

That’s easy - open the bottom cover and remove the WiFi/BT M.2 card - the small card with two antenna connectors to it.
Apart from the WiFi/BT there is no intentional RF radiator in the L13.

Cheers
nicole

1 Like
3

is that the chip that’s closest to the kill switches? it’s hard to see this chip because there’s glue all over it. it’s going to be tricky to remove.

4

NM, I found the chip (the Atheros chip).
BTW, the kill switch was nowhere close to Atheros chip. How are the kill switches guaranteed to work? Is this a feature of the motherboard?

5

You know the function of wires? They can conduct electrical signals over a distance :slight_smile: So the switches can be anywhere as long as they are connected properly - which is what we made sure.

Cheers
nicole

4 Likes
6

I wondered how the light switches in my house worked.

1 Like
7

I think I saw elsewhere in this forum a suggestion to remove them “carefully”. You may one day want to sell the laptop to upgrade to an even better one and your prospective buyer might want working radios. So that would mean reinstalling the M.2 card and reattaching the antennae.

8

For those of you who bought for privacy reasons
are being lain to, because I discover something
if someone has your number, they can still spy on you
you can tell this when the light starts blinking, which means
someone collect to your phone

9

Maaaaate, the Librem 13 is a laptop, not a phone.