No wifi access points with rtl8723be

Question

Just newly installed Elemntary OS Loki, I see wifi settings, but no any access points visible. When I go to windows 10, all wifi networks are in the list. My wifi adapter is Realtek RTL8723BE 802.11 bgn, on my HP machine. Somehow it seems that on Elementary OS wifi signal is weaker, than on windows 10. What might be a problem?

Answer 1

This is an issue with HP using one antenna wire on a wireless chip with 2 antenna connections. Since you see no wireless AP's we can just do the following in terminal.

First we will unload the module and reload it using the module parameter to try one option for the antenna

sudo modprobe -r rtl8723be
sudo modprobe rtl8723be ant_sel=1

Then we can check to see if any AP's are found with

iwlist scan | egrep -i 'ssid|quality'

Then we can try the other antenna option and compare results

sudo modprobe -r rtl8723be
sudo modprobe rtl8723be ant_sel=2
iwlist scan | egrep -i 'ssid|quality'

If the ant_sel=1 had better results then

echo "options rtl8723be ant_sel=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723beant.conf

If ant_sel=2 was the better option

echo "options rtl8723be ant_sel=2" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtl8723beant.conf