What Wi-Fi analyser?

rs6mra

I used to use wifi analyser a few years ago and now I can't seem to get it to work on my Android phone.
What other alternatives can you guys recommend?

Thanks

mickevh

It depends somewhat on what you wish to "analyze" - can you elaborate a bit...?

There are plenty of Wi-Fi tools ranging from freebies that do very little (and often promise a great deal, when basically all they do is report the RSSI of an AP's on the area,) to software/hardware combo's that grab all the packets and sometimes even have special hardware that can give info on the actual radio environment.

rs6mra

Thanks. I really only need it to determine what channels my neighbours are using in setting up my router, signal strength or dead spots depending on where I am in the house as I have an access point.
I have just had to change both my router and access point after quite a few years. All is well but it would be handy to have an app to point me in the right direction.

A friend just moved into a new build property approx 3500sq ft and the although there are connection points in nearly every room he struggles with his laptop/phone/tablet working wirelessly in some rooms. The AV company that did the installation put in 3 boosters/repeaters which I don't think help and I am curious to see what results I would get if i did a scan with an app.
I hope this helps

mickevh

I don't know what freebies are out there for android, but I'm using one on Windows called Acrylic Wi-FI - maybe it's cross platform. InSSIDer was a favoutie for a long time, but it got deprecated a while ago and before that I liked NetStumbler (long gone) as it reported both RSSI and signal to noise ratio (SNR) - though I suspect the latter may have been somewhat "synthesized."

Beyond that,  I guess you could head to the app store and search on "Wi-Fi Stumbler" and see what it turns up.

One suspects many of the freebies are much of a muchness in that they don't interrogate the actual radio signals but instead are performing a packet capture and reporting back the meta-data from such which often includes information such as the received signal strength as reported by the NIC hardware (though often that is far from calibrated, to I tend to look for trend more so than actual values.) One suspects they are crafted to look for a certain kind of packet called a "beacon" which is advertised by AP's regularly (and included the SSID name often.) Pity they don't include any info on the clients in the area as that's equally important, but the only tools I've seen that did that were "paid for" uber tools like AirMagnet or (free) Kismet which only ran on Linux and is far from "user friendly."

Hang around here long enough and doubtless others will chime in with some recommendations specific to Android.

maf1970

Netspot do an app for Android now.