Re: How to show ALL nearby Wi-Fi AP's BSSID every time

Paul <[email protected]>
Newsgroups alt.comp.os.windows-10,alt.comp.os.windows-11,alt.comp.microsoft.windows
Organization A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sun, 12/14/2025 7:54 PM, knuttle wrote:
> On 12/14/2025 2:41 PM, rbowman wrote:
>> On Sun, 14 Dec 2025 10:50:07 -0700, Marian wrote:
>>
>>> However, I agree with you that another operating system's Wi-Fi adapter
>>> drivers might report the full scan instead of just what's lately been
>>> cached.
>>
>> I'm seeing some variability.
>>
>> nmcli device wifi rescan
>> nmcli device wifi list
>>
>> on three different machines give different lists. The most complete is the
>> Lenovo laptop. Different chip sets and locations.
>>
>> The equivalent 'netsh wlan show networks' on the Windows laptop shows 7.
>> The ones with the signal strength below 40 come and go. netsh doesn't show
>> signal strength or the BSSID. I don't know if there are additional flags
>> for that or to do a rescan.e
>>
> Have you consider interference?  A car is in the way one minute not the next.  
> IS there any relationship between the presence or disappearance of a station and
> signal strength?   i.e. the ones appearing and disappearing are weak station.
> 
> I have seen similar things on my own computer but assigned it to the 
> variance of the signal transmission through the local environment and the 
> change micro weather.   Some one turns on a motor, a TV, Microwave, etc

There is a simulation of what it looks like, when a Wifi antenna is moved
about within a household.

   https://www.engadget.com/2014-09-01-wifi-physics-signal-reception.html

This is not a "perfect" simulation, but the intention of the grad student
sharing that with us, is to point out how there are gaps.

Radios work best when line-of-sight. And I've seen that with Bluetooth
transceivers. I had one of those short plugin ones, and it worked a lot
better when I put it on the end of an extension cord. And it also
had line-of-sight with the other transceiver that was also using
an extension cord.

But Bluetooth is so slow, it's really hard to tell when a path is
exceptionally good. It only delivers 75KB/sec or so. The Bluetooth signal
should propagate in the room, just like the grad student simulation.

   Paul
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