> Unless you have a full spectrum RF field meter and other very expensive test gear
You actually have that, at least for the frequency range that matters: the wireless hardware in your computer.
Your wireless card absolutely knows how good/bad the RF environment is - it wouldn't work without it. The problem is that none of this information is exposed to the user.
The Wi-Fi "signal strength" meter is consistently useless on basically every device I've tried. In fact, I wonder what would it take to actually make it go down, since it's happy sitting at max level even if you can't get a single packet through. I guess it must be measuring RSSI, when the one that matters to the user is "how many packets am I actually missing" which can be obtained by keeping stats on TCP flows or pinging the default gateway.
You actually have that, at least for the frequency range that matters: the wireless hardware in your computer.
Your wireless card absolutely knows how good/bad the RF environment is - it wouldn't work without it. The problem is that none of this information is exposed to the user.
The Wi-Fi "signal strength" meter is consistently useless on basically every device I've tried. In fact, I wonder what would it take to actually make it go down, since it's happy sitting at max level even if you can't get a single packet through. I guess it must be measuring RSSI, when the one that matters to the user is "how many packets am I actually missing" which can be obtained by keeping stats on TCP flows or pinging the default gateway.