Free Wireless Network Analysis Tools

One of the great things about the community is the way we share information.  At the recent SMB IT Professionals workshop here in Sydney, one of our members, Mark Wilton showed a few of us this really cool and FREE Wireless Network analyser tool.  I used it today to look at a problem with a client site that had some very intermittent wireless drop outs to find there were a few other “hidden” access points in buildings close by that were causing interference.

Here’s some of the graphs you can get from this tool – the first one showing channel allocation at my home.  There’s me in the blue and a few neighbours in the green and red.  On the client site today we had 5 other devices all sharing channel 6 and they were stacked on top of each other where the green bar is.

This 2nd graph shows a spectrogram of the channels and signal strength – hard to read but very cool.  There’s also some cool logging features in this tool that you can use to record signal strength as you walk around a building – great for a basic wireless survey.

Thanks Mark for sharing this tool with us.