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I want to decrease the signal strength of my wireless card (to minimize interference, among other factors), so I tried the following command:
iwconfig wlan0 txpower 1
Running iwconfig
again confirms the change (initially it displayed 19 dBm):
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn Mode: Master Tx-Power=1 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
However, in practice there does not seem to be any change: if I move my phone around, which is connected to this wireless hotspot, it has excellent signal even several meters away, just like when Tx-Power indicated 19 dBm
.
Even if I try setting the power to something like 0.0001
, the output of iwconfig
displays 0 dBm
, but in practice it does not seem to minimize signal strength.
I assumed that Tx-power would regulate how the hotspost signal might be seen by other devices, but I may be wrong.
Is there another way to verify whether this value is actually taken into account? Or is there a reason why iwconfig
might be lying about the actual Tx-power used?
Note: intended usage is to have my phone 10 cm away from the hotspot, using only a low-speed connection.
1But is there a way to know if my driver supports it? Setting txpower to 1 or 0 results in no error message, and
iwconfig
later reports as if it had worked.dmesg
also does not report any errors. I'm fine if the driver does not support it, but I'd like it to tell me, or at least be coherent with the output ofiwconfig
. Maybe there are several layers which are not communicating properly? – anol – 2015-03-12T07:48:04.170I do not know. I just had the same problem. Experimented with it and it changed nothing at all. – allo – 2015-03-13T07:37:41.043