mikeselectricstuff;295581 Wrote: > Not necessarily. There is no fundamental reason that the hardware needs > to produce a figure even vaguely proportional to dBm.
So the percentage measurement is just the RSSI referenced in Squonk's PDF? If so that makes me want to see dBm even more since RSSI has no universal meaning. > > except that this makes measuring things in terms of real physical units > like dBm is costly, and unnecessary for a wifi receiver > > If the unit of measurement doesn't matter, what's wrong with percent? > I didn't realize there was a significant cost to producing a dBm measurement, that would be valid reason for not displaying it. There's nothing wrong with a percent per se, I would just like to see something more concrete/easily understandable. For example I know that all wireless devices I've used have no problems at -60 dBm, I rarely see problems at -70 dBm, and things start to get sketchy nearing -80 dBm. My SB averages a 75% wireless signal strength, but what does that mean? Is 75% good? What percentage strength do I need to maintain a good connection with a SB? My knowledge of dBm does no good with a percentage that only has meaning relative to the Squeezebox. A dBm measurement allows you to perform a more apples to apples comparison between different wireless devices. > > The hardware will be producing a measuremnt value that has some > relationship to the signal strength ( and/or possibly some secondary > signal quality indicators like error rates). Expressing it as a > percentage makes some sense as it is related to the range of values > measurable with that hardware (although almost certainly not following > linear, log or other 'nice' transfer function, nor very repeatable > between units), possibly scaled to the limits of useable signal levels. > > However as soon as you call it dBm, this implies a relationship to > 'real' physical values that may be completely misleading, unrealistic > or just plain nonsensical, especially if the value is derived from > secondary signal-quality indicators. I guess I would hope that a dBm would have a real relationship to physical values that I could trust. I agree that untrustworthy dBm values would be worthless. How do you interpret wireless signal strength? Do you know what percentage strength is considered bad, ok, good? Thanks for your detailed reply, I always enjoy finding out how much I don't know. :) -- jimj ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jimj's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3776 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=46788 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
