I have a Wi-Fire adapter (its basically a directional wifi antannae that sits ontop of my laptop and is good for up to 1000 feet). I need a program that tells me the signal strengths of surrounding wifi hotspots in real time. I need to be able to spin my dish and watch as signals increase/decrease. I use gnome and NetworkManager isnt cutting it. I dont have to use this program to actually connect to the hotspot, just to judge signal strength/direction of the hotspot. I'm using Debian/Lenny(Testing) something in a repository would be nice but im willing to compile.

Thanks

Edit: Not looking for sniffers like Kismet or Airodump, Looking for something that shows connection bars and basic info.

Hi.

Kismet is actually probably your best bet. There's a graphical representation of signal strength for detected access points, and various other data about the seen networks. It'll also detect non-SSID-broadcasting networks. There's a perl script somewhere that'll create google map files from the kismet dumps too.

Dave

Kismet only displays 1 connection bar at a time I need something that displays all of them and refreshes rapidly. I guess I am out of luck for now.

I would think that wifi-radar may be something along the lines of what you're after. It's homesite is down as I write this, but there are rpm's, etc. around for download, plus a couple of sites offer some screenshots.

cheers,