Hello, I just want to share here. Hopefully it’s useful. Thanks
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 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.
It should be hobby, not hoby
Ah alright. 😂 Thanks for pointing out the mistake. Appreciate it.
TiL. I’m going to have to play around with this, thank you!
Why don’t you have an applet or something instead?
Because the machine could be headless so it can’t display the applet to click on
It’s as other said, headless. Sometimes I only need to check if the signal strength is alright, as I use that machine as servers and host several service on it.