How To Check WiFi Signal Strength on Ubuntu 16.04, 16.10

    Wavemon is a wireless device monitoring application that allows you to watch signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration and network parameters of your wireless network hardware. It should work (though with varying features) with all devices supported by the Linux kernel.

Dependencies    wavemon requires a Linux Kernel with wireless extensions enabled. If your Kernel setup uses CONFIG_CFG80211, make sure that the config option CONFIG_CFG80211_WEXT is set.

In addition, minimally the following are required:

•  Netlink libnl at least version 3.2,
•  including the Generic Netlink support (libnl-genl),
•  ncurses development files (libncurses5-dev),
•  the pkg-config package.

On Debian/Ubuntu, this can be done using

$ sudo apt-get -y install pkg-config libncurses5-dev libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev

Installation instructions:

    Wavemon can be installed on Ubuntu and Debian based system via running the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install wavemon

How To Use Wavemon

   Please note that wavemon is a commandline tool. It can only be accessed via terminal. In simple, run the command wavemon without any parameters in the terminal.

$ sudo wavemon

Scan window (F3 or ‘s’)
     A periodically updated network scan, showing access points and other wireless clients. It is sorted depending on sort_order. Each entry starts with the ESSID, followed by the colour-coded MAC address and the signal/channel information. A green/red MAC address indicates an (un-)encrypted access point, the colour changes to yellow for non-access points (in this case the mode is shown at the end of the line). The uncoloured information following the MAC address lists relative and absolute signal strengths, channel, frequency, and station-specific information. The station-specific information includes the station type (ESS for Access Point, IBSS for Ad-Hoc network), station count and channel utilisation.

Preferences (F7 or ‘p’)
    This allows you to change all program options such as interface and level scale parameters, and to save the new settings to the configuration file. To do so, select a parameter with and , then change the value with and .

Help (F8 or ‘h’)
    This page might show an online-help.

About (F9 or ‘a’)
     Release information and contact URLs.

Quit (F10 or ‘q’)
     Exit wavemon.