I have been tinkering with my old ASUS A43SV as my home server that serve several services that I have and host on (news.benyamin.xyz and op.benyamin.xyz). This server use a special layer 2 network…
Hello, I just want to share here. Hopefully it’s useful. Thanks
iw dev <interface> station dump will show every metric about the connection, including the signal strength and average signal strength.
It won’t show it as an ascii graphic as with nmcli, but it shouldn’t be hard to create a wrapper script to grep that info and convert it to a simplified output if you’re willing to put in the effort of understanding the dBm numbers.
E.g. -10 dBm is the maximum possible and -100 dBm is the minimum (for the 802.11 spec), but the scale is logarithmic so -90 dBm is 10x stronger than the absolute minimum needed for connectivity, and I can only get ~-20 dBm with my laptop touching the AP.
Basically my point is that the good ol’ “bars” method of demonstrating connection strength was arbitrarily decided and isn’t closely tied to connection quality. This way you get to decide what numbers you want to equate to a 100% connection.
Out of curiosity is there an analogous utility for if you are using networkd instead of NetworkManager?
Aside from parsing proc wireless…
iw dev <interface> station dumpwill show every metric about the connection, including the signal strength and average signal strength.It won’t show it as an ascii graphic as with
nmcli, but it shouldn’t be hard to create a wrapper script to grep that info and convert it to a simplified output if you’re willing to put in the effort of understanding the dBm numbers.E.g. -10 dBm is the maximum possible and -100 dBm is the minimum (for the 802.11 spec), but the scale is logarithmic so -90 dBm is 10x stronger than the absolute minimum needed for connectivity, and I can only get ~-20 dBm with my laptop touching the AP.
Basically my point is that the good ol’ “bars” method of demonstrating connection strength was arbitrarily decided and isn’t closely tied to connection quality. This way you get to decide what numbers you want to equate to a 100% connection.