On 2007/06/07 14:46, Kian Mohageri wrote: > On 6/6/07, Landry Breuil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> 2007/6/6, Lars Hansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> > >> > Landry Breuil wrote: >> > > one new upgrade which needs testing, xfce4-wavelan. wi_bsd.c has been >> > > hacked to work with OpenBSD's ieee80211_* structs, so i'd really >> > > appreciate feedback on this one. It works fine here with my iwi(4), and >> > > i'll try to send the cleaned patch (with #ifdef) upstream for their >> next >> > > release. >> > > >> > > http://ports.gcu.info/doku.php/openbsd/x11/xfce4/xfce4-wavelan >> > >> > For my ural device it shows a signal strength of 20% instead of 100% >> > when signal is 20dB. >> > ural0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 >> > lladdr 00:02:44:b5:ad:f1 >> > groups: wlan egress >> > media: IEEE802.11 autoselect (OFDM48 mode 11g) >> > status: active >> > ieee80211: nwid unet-makati chan 6 bssid 00:0f:3d:0d:eb:ac 20dB >> > nwkey <not displayed> 100dBm >> > inet6 fe80::202:44ff:feb5:adf1%ural0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x4 >> > inet 172.16.2.60 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 172.16.2.255 >> >> Mhh, i may have mixed signal strength/SIOCG80211TXPOWER, and rate/RSSI in >> my patch (patch-panel-plugin_wi_bsd_c)... i'm not used to wireless keywords >> :) >> I'll have a look at it and try to poke upstream to merge the correct >> changes.. > > I'm not very familiar with wireless either, but the 80211TXPOWER is > the 100dBm shown, while the 20dB is the RSSI (I thought).
if that figure was genuine you would most likely not be posting to misc@ right now > Could anybody explain to me why it is incorrect to show 20% given > the output Lars has provided? dB != % dB is unitless, it's a measure of one power level in relation to another power level. dBm is in relation to 1mW (0dB=1mW, 3dB=2mW, 6dB=4mW etc). The units used by various wireless drivers are... inconsistent. if you tcpdump radiotap (-yIEEE802_11_RADIO) ath reports like 'RSSI 33/64' which ifconfig shows as %; ral reports 'signal 48dB' which ifconfig shows directly; wi doesn't do radiotap but the one I tried shows the network in ifconfig around 20dB. This is all in the same location, just switching cards. fwiw wispy-tools peaks around -45dBm. Given all this I think the only thing you can do is come up with a number and print it, trying to convert to some % is not likely to give a meaningful result. For a given card, numbers changing in a certain direction indicate a stronger signal, but I think that's about all you can really count on.
