 Whenever I'm doing Wi-Fi testing, frequently WaveMon is my go-to tool to see the statistics on the Wi-Fi. Now, it's really simple. Most of the major distributions, you can sudo apt-get install in your WM-based distributions, WaveMon, I believe it's in the repositories for several other distros as well. Pretty easy tool to find. sudo apt-get install WaveMon, I've already got it installed, so I got the latest version here. Now, you can run it without root privileges, which we'll start it like that, and it gives you some of the details, but you're not able to run a scan. So we're actually gonna go ahead and quit, and we'll do sudo WaveMon. All right, now we're running as admin privileges, which gives us a couple more features. Now, the first initial screen out of the box, this is a default config. It's gonna give you the link quality, signal level, and I'm actually, because I'm on my desktop right here, it will default to the first wireless it finds. If you have multiple wireless, you can specify which one from the command line, but the majority of people just have a single wireless card in there. Now, my desktop is connected hardline, but I plugged in, if you haven't used them, a little alpha networks, ALFA networks, USB, just for this demo here. Great for doing wifi testing as well, that's why I have it. So you have right here all your little, you know, RXTX rate, retries, packet drops, things like that. Wifi is not like hardline in levels of simplicity. It is a lot more complicated layer. It's amazing it works as well as it is. I remember the early days of wifi, how difficult it was, it's become substantially better. But right away, what you're presented with is all the different statistics because wifi isn't just a connection over a certain frequency. There are channels and bandwidths and everything else. There's also this, and a lot of people sometimes don't realize what this is. Internally in the wifi stack, there are drops and retries. And there's also another profile curated by each wifi company. They create a profile for how fast the connection speed they think should be based on the signal and the gain of the antenna, which will control the link quality. So there's a lot of factors in wifi and this helps understand or see some of the other pieces of it. They're all in one easy display. So we can go here to list or scan and we can see all the other wifi's. So even though I'm connected to one, it will show all the others. It can perform a scan and see the different percentages, statistics, how far away they are essentially in terms of power. So it's kind of a nice all in one utility. It's really simple. It does have some preferences so you can change a couple things here. I'm just using the F keys to bounce around from option to option. It tells you which interface, channel signature, cycles, things like that. Now one of the cool things because this is command line, you can have a headless Linux box wherever you wanna have it and put it in an area and log in remotely via SSH and scan things. It's pretty cool. Now one of the things I wanna show you as well is because all this is being updated essentially in real time, I'm gonna go over here and we're gonna run an IPERF test. And something, even though this IPERF is pretty solid this 25, 30, you see a little bit of variance here. And here what you're noticing though is a number of like transmit retries or RX retries. It's kind of cool to be able to see this. So I'm moving the Wi-Fi around. I've actually got it in my hand now. Oh, bump the microphone with it but it's trying to find something I can do. Maybe put my hands around it. There we go. And change the Wi-Fi signal. I've got this little screw on antenna and I can take this off. And there we go. So we see the signal and what it, now the antenna is in my hand. It's got a little, I have a directional one on it. But this is what I use this utility for a lot is when we're doing the Wi-Fi testing because I can get snapshots and say this is what it looks like. This is how many retries or drops. And those little factors, whoops. I have unplugged it accidentally. No such device. So that's what happens when you unplug it while running it. So let me go ahead and plug it back in and quit, I was at the length of the USB. Whoops. Nice thing about Linux is when you unplug or plug something from USB it's pretty much instantaneously works again and reconnects. There's not, I didn't even pause the video for that. And there's only probably, yeah. Here's only the certain drops when the network interface was missing. Here's where it dropped a couple of seconds while the USB was unplugged and now it's back up and running. But no, this is just a handy utility I use. I just want to, it's a brief video. There's not a lot to it. It's really, really simple. It doesn't have a lot of options. It's got a level histogram where you can see the levels and things like that I don't use, but you can see this. Mortarsly, I will use it a lot, which I didn't run it when I restarted it. Hold on, sudo wave mom, there we go. I mostly use it for the scan list so I can find Wi-Fi networks as it'll list them all out, even hidden. This does not do any functional control though I still use the networking interface to actually join and move from networks. It's just all about display information. And more than anything else, I use this when this is the testing I was doing for the UniFi video that I did to see and understand just the different connections. And as noted in that video, when you, even though you see the link quality, maybe be a little bit less or the signal be a little bit less, we were still able to get more speed out of different devices. And so you'll see some future videos because I want to do some more Wi-Fi testing because a lot of people have been asking about it. Wi-Fi testing is just so hard because people say, yeah, but I had a tree in the way. When I was doing a site to site, it made a big difference, it does. And it's, I've almost wondered if there's a difference in Wi-Fi signal penetration from different types of tree. Do pine trees more than oak trees? I do know one of the sites to sites that we've worked on the seasons here in Michigan make a huge difference. Cause as the leaves come off the tree, their signal goes up because they just don't have a clear line of sight but they have good enough to get the data they need across. So there's little factors that play into Wi-Fi. I mean, you're transmitting through the airwaves, you've got density of moisture in the air and many, many other factors including a lot of potential outside interference causing issues with the Wi-Fi. So future experiments, I'll still be using this tool and when everyone messaged me in there, what tool, what tool is this? I'll just reply with this video real quick. Like I said, not much to it. Just a handy, great utility to put everything in one little window and easily screen-cord-corded, screen-captured or when I'm doing things remotely, plugging it in. And I think Wave Man will work fine on a Raspberry Pi. Now I say, I think I haven't tested it cause I don't have, I don't know if I have a Pi with Wi-Fi? Maybe? I don't remember. I have a couple of them laying around that I've been playing with for mostly games. This is for my retro Pi video on a while back. Maybe I'll do some more Raspberry Pi videos but it is because as long as you have a little institution that supports it, this is also kind of a novel thing you can do if you wanted to use a Raspberry Pi and the Wi-Fi on it to leave it somewhere but remotely check Wi-Fi signal strength and changes. Another use case you could use it for. So that's it, Wave Man, real simple to use. Not a lot to it but very, very useful in terms of when I'm doing all this Wi-Fi testing. I've not found really in Linux any graphical tool that I thought was substantially superior to it. And it's been a while since I looked so if someone has a comment or one that they think is really amazing graphical tool, cool. If not, I'm gonna keep using Wave Man because it's handy and easy to read and concise and I know where all the things are. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details which you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing feedback or if you just wanna say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. 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