Wifi signal strength can vary from room to room so knowing where the best spot to pitch up when snagging the latest 1.5GB Ubuntu .iso is valuable information.
There are several apps available on Linux that can assist you in finding the most signal-drenched Wi-Fi location in your house or apartment.
Ubuntu even includes one out of the box as the Indicator-Network applet shows you relative Wifi Signal Strength in the form of an icon. The fewer white bars the icon has, the weaker the signal strength.
You can use this as a rough n’ ready guide for finding a Wi-Fi spot.
But what if you want something a little more involved?
Test wifi signal strength on Ubuntu
Today we’re writing about a simple bash script called WiFi Analyse. It’s by no-means the only app to do this job but it is one brought to our attention most recently.
“WiFi analyse is a simple bash script that allows you to get the signal level, link quality and ping time of your device connected to a network,” the project developer explains on GitHub.
Rumesh explained more in an email to us saying that his tool “…allows anyone to easily check their wifi signal strength and ping times in a certain area. The script returns the signal strength and ping times every second so it is the ideal script to run while moving a laptop around the house to check signal strength in different rooms.”
WiFi Analyse is open-source and available to download on GitHub.com.
Download & Use WiFiAnalyse on Ubuntu
First things first: download the Wifi Analyse script from GitHub:
Next, to run it, open a new Terminal window and cd to the directory the script is in and run: ./wifianalyse.
If you get a ‘permission denied’ response you’ll need to go to the script, right-click on it, select ‘Properties > Permissions’ and check the ‘allow to run as program’ box.
When you run Wifi Analyse you’re instantly asked to enter the wireless interface name you wish to test, along with the IP address of your router to ping. This information is crucial to the running of the script so make sure you enter the correct information.
You can find/check this information by going to the Network Indicator > Connection Information.
You can find a log of all the information shown in the Terminal at ~/WifiAnalyse.log.