WiFi Signal Strength

On Tue, 14 May 2019 19:08:52 +0100, "NY" wrote:

"Char Jackson" wrote in message
.. .
Another consideration is how active the other signal-producing sources
are. If I'm asking myself which 2.4GHz channel I should choose, and I
see that channel 1 has 10 SSIDs on it and channel 6 has only 1 SSID on
it, should I automatically pick channel 6? No, because if the single
SSID on channel 6 is extremely active while the 10 SSIDs on channel 1
are mostly dormant, then channel 1 is the better choice. In short, it's
pretty hard to tell, which is why in some/many/most cases it's becoming
easier to just let the router (access point) use its own algorithm to
pick a channel.

Is there a way to tell how much traffic a "foreign" wifi network is
carrying, when you are not actually connected to it to run a Wireshark scan?

The short answer is yes, but I can't say that I remember exactly how. I
only know it was one of the tools from the Backtrack CD. Backtrack was a
live Linux CD used for penetration testing, so it had all of the cool
tools. Backtrack morphed into Kali Linux in 2013, most recently updated
in March 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackTrack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Linux

The tool that I used might have been Kismet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kismet_(software)


--

Char Jackson