I want to decrease the signal strength of my wireless card (to minimize interference, among other factors), so I tried the following command:
iwconfig wlan0 txpower 1
Running iwconfig
again confirms the change (initially it displayed 19 dBm):
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn Mode: Master Tx-Power=1 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
However, in practice there does not seem to be any change: if I move my phone around, which is connected to this wireless hotspot, it has excellent signal even several meters away, just like when Tx-Power indicated 19 dBm
.
Even if I try setting the power to something like 0.0001
, the output of iwconfig
displays 0 dBm
, but in practice it does not seem to minimize signal strength.
I assumed that Tx-power would regulate how the hotspost signal might be seen by other devices, but I may be wrong.
Is there another way to verify whether this value is actually taken into account? Or is there a reason why iwconfig
might be lying about the actual Tx-power used?
Note: intended usage is to have my phone 10 cm away from the hotspot, using only a low-speed connection.