I’ve posted previously about my streaming go-kit, which has largely been retired as I’m not doing nearly as much streaming as before, having shifted over to Wi-Fi. This score is far more accurate, since it takes environmental noise into account, as well as overlapping Wi-Fi networks.As I prepare for another trip to a customer site, I figured I’d post the contents of my wireless engineering go-kit for the benefit of others wanting to put one together. The link quality score is carried across from the Home version, making it easy to assess all your different networks from any part of the building. Where the Home version allows you to optimise a single wireless network, inSSIDer for Office lets you track up to eight individual SSIDs, so it’s great for big offices where you have a multiple-access-point setup spread around the building. You should never underestimate this last source of pollution – many people complain that their office network slows to a crawl around lunchtime, but not many realise that at least some of this is due to people nuking spuds in the office microwave for lunch! While it obviously doesn’t have quite the sensitivity of its bigger brothers, like them it does perform way beyond what the Wi-Fi adapter in your computer can achieve, listening out for all kinds of other interference in the 2.4GHz band, including things such as Bluetooth signals, wireless headphones and speakers, ZigBee-based home-automation products and good old, leaky microwave ovens. This actually comes with a tiny, new Wi-Spy Mini dongle, similar in size to the USB Bluetooth transceivers that are often shipped with wireless keyboards and mice. This costs $199, and so sits between the free inSSIDer for Home and the more expensive Wi-Spy tools that I’ve looked at previously. If you’re prepared to spend a reasonable sum of money, though, there’s also the new inSSIDer for Office. As with the previous versions, it doesn’t require any extra hardware, since the software simply uses your existing wireless NIC. It’s a great update for anyone who’s used previous versions, and best of all it remains free. The software also now gives you an easy-to-understand “link score”, which is much more useful when wandering around the building than having to remember and compare dBm values and interpret network overlaps. As you walk around your home or office you can easily see the least congested channels, so you can give your own router the best possible chance. You get a nice, clear visual representation of the competing networks from your neighbours, particularly which channels they’re using and their relative signal strengths. Its main purpose is for trying to optimise the Wi-Fi configuration in your home or office. ![]() So inSSIDer was born, and the company reckons it has now had more than eight million downloads, and more than 40,000 uses every day. ![]() Back then, the only similar tool was NetStumbler, which hadn’t been updated for ages, and had problems running on newer 64-bit versions of Windows. For those of you unaware of this program, MetaGeek released the original version in 2008. You can probably think of it as inSSIDer version 3. Let’s start with inSSIDer for Home, the latest version of MetaGeek’s ever-popular free Wi-Fi scanning tool. ![]() ![]() The new version makes it far easier to identify your own network, and those that overlap it
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