The thread I was referring to is here (NFC Interference?) It appears I CAN post a reply (that is, it it not closed) - I was initially viewing it (and a couple of others you can see in the "related content" to the right of that post before I was logged in and therefore no reply option was visible. My error as a posting newbie, and I do apologize for it.
As far as my use of the NFC feature being more experimental - I would beg to differ. Samsung Pay (a device manufacturer service accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen) supports a "tap to add" payment card (whcih clearly uses the NFC function to read a credit card and input much of the required information to add that card to your pay account) - so I would not find the ability to read and display NFC data as being at all experimental. And, NFC does NOT for fine on my S25 Ultra. It DID work great for reading credit card NFC and even reading passport NFC data using several APPs from the store on my S22 Ultra. And even with that device, I never used it to actually pay at a POS station - I didn't realize that was its supported/design intent sole purpose!
I do understand a factory reset may (or may not) resolve the issue. I will probably have to go that route but if I do, I'm not sure I can restore data I've backed up without potentially restoring whatever corruption is currently preventing the NFC from working. And if I can't restore everything... OUCH!
The fact that I did get ONE clean read in my recent tests and an occasional beep when attempting reads since the software update tells me it can work rather than just dead. It would seem to me more like a short in the electronics of the NFC cicuits, or some software supressing proper function. The prior would be a hardware fault - the latter software probably fixed by a factory reset. Of course, a factory reset is something I wish to avoid, and I do suspect once I restore everything, my issue may return if it is some form of software (APP) corruption. In my troubleshooting attempts, I did delete all APPs I downloaded from the Play Store that use NFC, restarted and tried the Samsung Pay tap to add function and since then I have had no response to read attempts of cards. Running diagnostics from the members app or from the settings area (seems to be the same diagnostics) tests NFC as the third test and both give green check marks. And I did take it out of the case for testing!
