A tool to measure signal strength of wireless

Question

I want to know if there exists any command line option or GUI tool (Ubuntu 11.10) so that I can measure the strength of wireless signal at a given location. I have a house where the wireless is not easily accessible at all corners I want to know at which corners or rooms the signal is weak.

Answer 1

On the command line you can use iwconfig and look for "Link Quality" and "Signal level" values.

When walking around with a netbook I often use this command which updates the output of iwconfig every second:

watch -n1 iwconfig

Answer 2

wavemon

A console app with color display and lots of easy to read information.

To install it enter the following commands:

 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install wavemon

To run it enter:

 wavemon

Answer 3

A prettier one:

watch -n1 "awk 'NR==3 {print \"WiFi Signal Strength = \" \$3 \"00 %\"}''' /proc/net/wireless"

Source: http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/06/display-wifi-signal-strength-in-real.html

Answer 4

A command line option that does not require installation of additional software is the iwconfig command. To get quality of a connection simply run

iwconfig wls8 | grep -i --color quality

• Output:

    Link Quality=56/70  Signal level=-54 dBm  
  

wls8 may not be applicable to you, so replace it with whatever option you need. Or simply, run iwconfig to see all output.

Here is a blog post that describes plenty of other options 8 Linux Commands: To Find Out Wireless Network Speed, Signal Strength And Other Information

Answer 5

With a small modification to measure the quality of the link (Link quality) and the signal level (Signal level).

   watch -n1 -d "awk '{print NR == 3 \" WiFi Link Quality = \ "int (\ $ 3 * 1.428571429) \"% (\ "\ $ 3 \" 00 / 70.00) \ "; print \" level WiFi = \ "\ $ 4 \" 00 dBm \ "} '' '/ proc / net / wireless" signal

Note: The -d switch to watch highlights values ​​when they change (highlight Changes Between updates).