Is there anything better than Network Manager for checking for WiFi signals?
Network Manager is fine for when I'm at home where the laptop and tablet simply connecting to the home router but as soon as there's any difficulty deciding what to connect to it's pretty useless:-
There's no control over [re-]scanning so you can't move to different positions and request a re-scan to see if there are different WiFi signals and/or signal strength has changed.
The signal strength indication is no help in optimising the signal, one needs a more accurate level indicator to tell if moving this way or that improves the signal.
There's no indication of the type of encryption on signals which have encryption keys. This is a real killer sometimes when somoene knows the password/key but not what *type* of key it is. I had this problem at my wife's office recently. Windows XP reports the encryption type so surely Linux should be able to.
Are there any tools specifically for scanning/characterising WiFi signals and/or are there any replacements for Network Manager that make handling WiFi connections easier?