To finish, I’d like to give you a couple of suggestions on how to improve your wireless connection if the RSSI reading is poor.Ĭheck the obvious first. -110 and lower = Very poor connection and likely to be unusable.

51 is better than -54 for example.īelow is a basic outline of the ranges that represent a good to bad connection: Notice that the numbers are negative, therefore the nearer the number to 0, the better the connection.

the higher the number, the better the connection.

Without going into too much techy talk on how RSSI works, it is basically: You can see that my Bluetooth keyboard connection jumps from between -51 to -54 which is a fairly good wireless connection. If you keep the ‘Alt/Option’ key held down, the RSSI value will stay displayed next to your Bluetooth device in the devices list. Step 4) Select ‘Monitor Connection RSSI’ from the pull down menu: Step 3) ‘Alt/Option’ + ‘Left Click’ on the action cog/gear at the bottom of the preference pane next to the add and delete buttons.

Step 2) Highlight the Bluetooth device you wish to monitor. Step 1) Open System Preferences on your Mac and choose the ‘Bluetooth’ preference pane. Then follow the below steps to monitor the connection: To use the connection monitor, a Bluetooth device must be enabled and currently connected to your Mac. I have found this useful a couple of times to see if, and why, my Bluetooth keyboard is under performing with slow key response and jittery mouse movement. OS X has a nice little Bluetooth monitor connection graph which updates live connection info using RSSI (received signal strength indicator). I regularly hook up my MacBook Pro to an Apple wireless keyboard and mouse and often find myself wanting to see if I have a good signal between the two. Please Note: Click here for the updated blog post for Troubleshooting Bluetooth devices & their connection strength in Mavericks.

Bt rssi