I pulled an old DD-WRT router from my semi-retired router box, and as suggested, DD-WRT does report the client signal strength.
So, I put Bloomsky, ball and solar panel back on a wood stand in the back yard at about 4 feet above ground. The ball was linked to the Netgear N300 router running DD-WRT. The router was placed on a surface about 4 feet above ground in the room with no nearby obstructions (and not moved during testing). The Ball was about 100 feet and three walls (at an angle) about north-north-west from the router in the house. The yard slopes down a bit from the house, so the router was probably another 4-8 feet or so above the ball. The solar panel remained fixed pointed south, the ball was rotated above the fixed solar panel on its plastic spike post.
The ball was rotated 45 degrees at a time through the circle. It was a pain, because I had to wait for each 5 min transmission to measure the Bloom Sky signal at the router on a desktop computer near the router in the room. I did two runs for each compass point, e.g. east, south east, south, etc.
So, for me, it looks like the best ball orientation is rain pad to the North, when my router is south-south-east of the ball. For those on the edge of usable signal strength, rotation of the ball may be important, even go - no/go. However, the difference is not as large as I expected. On the other hand, note that dB is a log scale.
The worst signal is when the rain pad points back to my router.
There is some change by rotation, however it is not as much of an effect as I expected. Signal Strength is in dB (possibly dBm). Signal quality takes into account noise and signal to noise ratio (SNR):
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