Found a related bug report: Hammerhead: Some Wifi networks don't appear #714.

@jezek Hmm … doesn't look too exciting. Can anybody share some information, if that is intentional behaviour?

Can anybody confirm UT supporting local radio regulation? That is, regulatory domain is not set to 00 (worldwide) on a device? A shell command to check your device would be

$ iw reg get

The first line of output should contain a valid two-letter country code. Or is 00 what UT users get?

With a Nexus 5 otherwise running fine and with locale set to German, I cannot connect to wifi channels 12 and 13, that are legal channels in Germany. I've so far tried setting regdom via

$ adb shell sudo iw reg set DE

(no error message), but that doesn't seem to have any effect:

$ adb shell iw reg get
country 00: DFS-UNSET
	(2402 - 2472 @ 40), (6, 20), (N/A)
	(2457 - 2482 @ 20), (6, 20), (N/A), NO-IR
	(2474 - 2494 @ 20), (6, 20), (N/A), NO-OFDM, NO-IR
	(5170 - 5250 @ 40), (6, 20), (N/A), NO-IR
	(5735 - 5835 @ 40), (6, 20), (N/A), NO-IR
$ adb shell iwlist wlan0 channel
wlan0     20 channels in total; available frequencies :
          Channel 01 : 2.412 GHz
          Channel 02 : 2.417 GHz
          Channel 03 : 2.422 GHz
          Channel 04 : 2.427 GHz
          Channel 05 : 2.432 GHz
          Channel 06 : 2.437 GHz
          Channel 07 : 2.442 GHz
          Channel 08 : 2.447 GHz
          Channel 09 : 2.452 GHz
          Channel 10 : 2.457 GHz
          Channel 11 : 2.462 GHz
          Channel 36 : 5.18 GHz
          Channel 40 : 5.2 GHz
          Channel 44 : 5.22 GHz
          Channel 48 : 5.24 GHz
          Channel 149 : 5.745 GHz
          Channel 153 : 5.765 GHz
          Channel 157 : 5.785 GHz
          Channel 161 : 5.805 GHz
          Channel 165 : 5.825 GHz

system information:

$ adb shell system-image-cli --info
b'<elided>\n'
current build number: 4
device name: hammerhead
channel: ubports-touch/16.04/stable
last update: 2018-12-10 09:26:26
version version: 4
version ubports: 20181126-12599
version tag: OTA-6
version keyring: archive-master
version device: 20181126-2421

firmware version (latest, I think):

$ adb shell /usr/share/ofono/scripts/list-modems
[ /ril_0 ]
    Revision = M8974A-2.0.50.2.30
[...]

I did observe the problem with OTA-5 already. Any suggestions how to activate wifi channels 12 and 13? The device feels one-eyed.