Re: Power on bar

[Maxim Levitsky <maximlevitsky gmail com>]

On Fri, 2009-04-24 at 11:14 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 22:33 +0300, Maxim Levitsky wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 19:48 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2009-04-18 at 23:15 +0200, Josu Lazkano wrote:
> > > > Hello everybody, I am new in this mail list.
> > > > 
> > > > I want to know if is posible to add the power level (on numbers) on
> > > > the bar for each wifi.
> > > 
> > > You mean an actual % number in addition to the bars?  It's possible of
> > > course, but I also tend to think it's pretty misleading.  Signal
> > > strength is pretty ambiguous and you can't really read anything from the
> > > difference between 50% to 55%.  Given that, I also tend to think that
> > > people wanting more specific signal strength probably want to use a
> > > different tool that gives them direct dBm or RSSI in addition to NM.  We
> > > could display that sort of thing in the Information dialog though.
> > > 
> > > Dan
> > 
> > 
> > It would be very useful.
> > Here at university, sometimes AP are weak, but following rule always
> > works:
> > 
> > 
> > -79dBm  -   -82dBm  - works fine
> > -83dBm  -   -85dBm  - works at low speeds
> > -86dBm  -   -89dBm  - hardly works at all
> > -90dBm  -   ...     - doesn't work
> > 
> > NM shows all these as two bars (sometimes one)
> 
> Sounds like your driver is not doing the right thing, or that NM has a
> bug in how it interprets signal strength.  What hardware, kernel
> version, and driver are you using?

iwlwifi from iwlwifi-git + NM from ubuntu 8.10
IWL3945 BG, kernel 2.6.30-rc2 (from iwlwifi.git)


I don't think this is a bug, just NM shows all range.
In my opinion I don't care if signal strengh is -50 dbm, -60dBm
or -70dBm, because all these works in same way, thus I want to see the
dBm value somewhere in accessible place (a popup maybe?)

(best solution I think is to add an option to replace the bars with dBm
value, I would be very happy to see this)


Best regards,
	Maxim Levitsky