Bluetooth LE Signal Strength Linux

No need to connect when using btmgmt

$ sudo btmgmt find

Discovery started
hci0 type 7 discovering on
hci0 dev_found: 50:8C:FD:99:0A:EC type LE Random rssi -80 flags 0x0000 
AD flags 0x06 
eir_len 23
…

The relative signal strength indicator is rssi -80, but the list is much longer containing more information about this and other devices.

To spy on your Bluetooth neighbourhood showing only unique MAC addresses with their strongest RSSI, run the following command:

$ sudo btmgmt find |grep rssi |sort -n |uniq -w 33

hci0 dev_found: 40:43:42:B3:71:11 type LE Random rssi -53 flags 0x0000 
hci0 dev_found: 44:DA:5F:EA:C6:CF type LE Random rssi -78 flags 0x0000 
hci0 dev_found: 7F:7D:08:6B:E0:37 type LE Random rssi -74 flags 0x0000 
hci0 dev_found: A4:58:0F:21:A1:8C type BR/EDR rssi -79 flags 0x0000

On Linux, the way to do this is with the hcitool command. However, you have to be connected to get the rssi of a device. If you want to achieve this from the command line, try:

#hcitool rssi AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF

If you want to see the actual C code to achieve this, take a look at the bluez tools/hcitool.c file, under the cmd_rssi function.

static void cmd_rssi(int dev_id, int argc, char **argv)
{
    ...
}

---

For Bluetooth Low Energy, I only know one way to do this, and that is using the #btmon command. Run btmon in the background then scan for Bluetooth Low Energy devices:

#./btmon &
# hcitool lescan

The results displayed on the monitor should be similar to this:

> HCI Event: LE Meta Event (0x3e) plen 12                                                                                  
      LE Advertising Report (0x02)
        Num reports: 1
        Event type: Scan response - SCAN_RSP (0x04)
        Address type: Public (0x00)
        Address: AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF (<Vendor Name>)
        Data length: 0
        ***RSSI: -34 dBm (0xde)***
AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF <Device Name>

Note that when using btmon you do not have to connect to get the rssi of a BLE device.