• Andrea Merello's avatar
    rtl818x_pci: provide dBm signal information for rtl8185 · 7049327a
    Andrea Merello authored
    This patch makes the driver report signal information for rtl8185
    boards using dBm instead of unspecified unit.
    Rtl8180 remains untouched.
    
    I did some tests to confirm the correctness of the measure performed
    by the board and it seems reasonably correct.
    
    The test setup has been made by connecting an AP with coax and
    RF attenuators to the card antenna port.
    
    In order to get a reference measure I tried with several cards with
    different chipset I own. I found that many gave different results, and
    I finally selected two cards that gave me consistent results to use
    as reference: AR9271 and Prism54-usb (isl3887 with Frisbee radio).
    
    Using this references I compared the RSSI information with my rtl8185
    and I repeated tests with three different attenuation values, increasing
    attenuation by 10dB each step.
    I made only relative measures, making NO assumption about source power.
    
    CCK measures seem very close to my references, OFDM are a little bit
    less precise but, considering that these cards are not measuring
    instrumentation, IMHO this is still fairly good.
    
    CCK measures (1Mbps beacons)
    
     ATTENUATOR 1
    p54usb:    -58dBm
    ath9k_htc: -59dBm
    rtl8185:   -59dBm
    
     ATTENUATOR 2
    p54usb:    -67dBm
    ath9k_htc: -68dBm
    rtl8185:   -70dBm
    
     ATTENUATOR 3
    p54usb:    -78dBm
    ath9k_htc: -79dBm
    rtl8185:   -79dBm
    
    OFDM measures (54Mbps ping)
    
     ATTENUATOR 1
    p54usb:    -58dBm
    ath9k_htc: -57dBm
    rtl8185:   -62dBm
    
     ATTENUATOR 2
    p54usb:    -68dBm
    rtl8185:   -71dBm
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrea Merello <andrea.merello@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohn W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
    7049327a
dev.c 54.2 KB