Increase Wifi Signal Strength Tx-Power on Kali Linux

This week I just learn and try the new wi-fi device, and of course also testing their durability (maximize the warranty time 😛 ). Today we will learn together how to Increase Wifi Signal Strength Tx-Power on Kali Linux, actually you can do this on other Linux distro as well, but in this article we will do on a Kali Linux.

hacking tricks and tips

The default Tx-Power of wireless is set to 20 dBm or 100 mW, usually used by 802.11b/g Wireless LAN 20 MHz-wide channels in the 2.4 GHz ISM band (5 mW/MHz) and bluetooth Class 1 radio.
We also able to set the Tx-power default setting from 20 dBm = 100mW increased to 30 dBm or 1 W = 1000mW, but we must do this with our own risk as it will probably damage your card eventually! Moreover increase the tx-power can be illegal in some countries, so it's better you find out your country rule of law.


Requirements:
1. Wireless card (some wireless card cannot configure tx-power)
2. Wavemon (apt-get install wavemon)

Step by step Increase Wifi Signal Strength(TxPower) on Kali Linux:

1. Open up our terminal (see tutorial here how to create the shortcut) and type

ifconfig

and make sure your wireless network already detected and up.





2. Now let's check our wireless card default tx-power by running this command

iwconfig wlan0

the default tx-power of my wireless card is 20 dBm.
3. When we check the default signal quality through wavemon,





4. To change the tx-power we must turn off our wireless interface by running

ifconfig wlan0 down

and then change the regional to BO (Bolivia) which in that country they allow the use of 1000 mW tx-power

iw reg set BO

turn on the wireless interface again

ifconfig wlan0 up

5. Now we can check again our wireless card status by running

iwconfig wlan0

if the tx-power already changed, let's check our wavemon, and see the difference.





6. We can set up our wireless card into specific channel by running

iwconfig wlan0 channel 8

or we can also directly change the tx-power using this command

iwconfig wlan0 txpower 30

Conclusions:


1. Some problems may occur when we set higher than default tx-rate; such as:

• overheating of the power amplifier chip and the card which will cause lower efficiency and more data errors;
• overdriving the amplifier which will cause more data errors;
• excessive power usage for the card and this may overload the default power supply of the board that the card is located on resulting in voltage drop and reboot or excessive temperatures for the board.