Wireless Testing Tool For Mac

Wireless Testing Tool For Laptop
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Wireless Testing Tool For Mac Os X

Wireless internet is everywhere these days and you could have several WiFi capable devices connected to your own wireless network. Because of that it’s important the WiFi router is placed in the best available location to give the longest range and strongest signal to as many devices as possible. If the router is placed in a poor location the signal could be weak, intermittent or cause constant dropouts.

Sep 13, 2018 WiFi Scanner Mac WiFi analyzer tool offers WiFi download and upload speed testing to uncover possible issues. It can also help you detect unauthorized devices on your wireless network with the help of IP scanner.

Your Mac can use Wireless Diagnostics to perform additional analysis. Quit any apps that are open, and connect to your Wi-Fi network, if possible.; Hold down the Option key and choose Open Wireless Diagnostics from the Wi-Fi status menu. Mac Tools® Diagnostic line of products are capable of performing critical diagnostics, reprogramming and quick code information. Ignition Testing Tools. Memory Saving. Digital Multimeters and Accessories. Circuit Fuse Testers. Relay Testing. Trailer Testing and Maintenance. Terminal and Contact Tools. Best handheld Wi-Fi test tools. Is a Wi-Fi security auditing and penetration-testing tool, built specifically for that purpose. It’s basically a wireless router sporting all kinds of. NetSpot is a free wireless network signal analysis and troubleshooting tool available for both Mac and Windows computers. In addition to a standard WiFi discovery and monitoring section it also has a site survey feature that allows for the relative network signal strengths to be plotted onto a map of your building or local area.

There are many factors that can affect the quality and strength of a WiFi network connection. These include walls, floors, ceilings, electrical appliances, anything emitting radiation or electromagnetism, and of course distance to the router. Windows and most bundled WiFi software allows you to see how good the current wireless signal is. To get a better idea how the signal is behaving and whether it gets affected by other factors it’s a good idea to monitor the signal strength over a period of time.

Watching how your WiFi signal behaves over several minutes or even hours could help identify if the current location for it is ideal or causing problems. Here we list 5 free tools that show a graph for your wireless signal so you can watch it over a period of time to see how it behaves.

1. NetSpot

NetSpot is a free wireless network signal analysis and troubleshooting tool available for both Mac and Windows computers. In addition to a standard WiFi discovery and monitoring section it also has a site survey feature that allows for the relative network signal strengths to be plotted onto a map of your building or local area.

The program starts in Discover mode which shows available wireless networks along with some general statistics. Double click on the target network to open the details window. This has a Signal tab which shows a graph of the signal strength over a period of time, the last 5, 30, or 60 minutes can be shown in the window at once. Also available is a Tabular Data window that shows the same data as the graph but in text form.

The frequency of the signal strength scanning can be either left at the default of 5 seconds or changed to 10, 30 or 60 seconds. Do be aware that NetSpot crashed for us on first run but appeared to work fine after a system reboot.

Download NetSpot

2. inSSIDer

The sad thing about inSSIDer is it stopped being free and became a shareware application from version 3 onwards. Luckily version 2 remains free and open source although it’s not had any updates since 2012 and compiled versions with the free source code are a bit hard to find.

After installing and running the program click the Time Graph tab to see the signal strength graphs for all found wireless networks. Uncheck those you don’t want to appear in the graph display to be left with the signals to be monitored. The display shows signal strength over a period of 5 minutes and any selected SSID will be shown in bold. Although you cannot view the signal for more than the 5 minutes you can right click on the graph and copy an image of it to the clipboard for a snapshot record. This can in turn be pasted into a paint program.

Download inSSIDer 2.1

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3. Homedale

Homedale has a big advantage over the other tools here because it’s the only one that is completely portable, which many people prefer. The program is well laid out and easy to use. Besides the signal graphs you can also get your location at the click of a button from a mapping service such as Google.

Monitoring a wireless network is a simple case of going into the Access Points tab and double clicking on the access point. Its icon will turn red to signify it has been selected and you will be shown the current signal strength graph. The graph itself refreshes every 2 seconds by default and shows about 20 minutes worth of signal history. The refresh rate can be changed from the Options tab to 1, 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. Right click to save the current graph as an image or start logging the history data to a text file.

Homedale also supports a few command line switches so you can launch it to start monitoring and logging a specified network automatically. Use /? in a Command Prompt to get a list of arguments that can be used. For example the following will create a log.txt and add a signal strength entry every 3 seconds for the SSID Raymondcc_WiFi.

Homedale -s Raymondcc_WiFi -l log.txt -r 3000

Download Homedale

4. Acrylic Wi-Fi Home

The Home version of Acrylic Wi-Fi is free for personal use and has enough to show a signal strength graph for monitoring or troubleshooting. One useful feature missing and only available in the paid Pro version is the ability to alter the timeline of the signal strength graph from the default of 5 minutes to 1, 3 or 10 minutes.

On install and launch click Options (3 horizontal lines) and choose Advanced Mode to make the graph full width and remove the useless Pro only network quality pane. To remove a wireless network from the graph click on the color block to the left of its name in the SSID list. The graph is colored into good and not so good strengths, highlighting an SSID will bold it for easier viewing, Microsoft .NET 4.5 is required which will need to have been installed on Windows 7 or Vista. Visual C++ 2012 Redistributables are also required.

Download Acrylic Wi-Fi Home

5. Vistumbler

This tool has a few quite advanced options such as GPS support, live Google Earth tracking and a number of experimental features. More standard functions include getting WiFi signal strength and information as well as the ability to audibly speak out the signal strength to you.

You don’t really have to do much to get the strength information after installation, simply click Scan APs and click on Graph 1 or Graph 2. Then click on a wireless network in the list to populate the graphs. The first is a simple line that measure signal strength over a few minutes. The second is a bar graph (pictured above) which shows the signal strength history for around 11 minutes. Changing the Refresh loop in Settings > Misc Settings to another value from the default of 1000ms (1 second) will lengthen or shorten the graph history time.

Download Vistumbler

We did also look at Xirrus WiFi Inspector and NetSurveyor although both don’t log wireless signals for very long. Xirrus also requires you to fill in an online form to get the download link from the website.

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Tried netspot inssider and homedale. It seems that homedale is the only one who will log signal stregth for long period of times (indefinitely?) in the log file.

Go to access points and double click your router
go to access point graph right click and ask to log, you need to specify a file name

The log file is very simple and has the format yy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss: .
you can select the whole text, past it to, say, google sheets and write in an empty cell the formula =min(b:b), it’ll show the min power value of the log file

kcl7 years ago

Homedale create a file named oui.txt inside its residing folder which is very annoying.
Every time you close the program you have to delete this file manually, it consumes
about 2M of disk space.

Thanks looks well done and there are some other nice utilities at the site.

Lawwe7 years ago

Thaks for good Proggy

Slow Internet and network performance are annoying. However it's hard to troubleshoot issues when you just feel that performance is slow. You've got to know the kind of performance you are getting in order to improve it. Let's take a look at a few ways you can actually gage and monitor network performance.

Bandwidth versus Throughput
The first order of business is to understand the difference between bandwidth and throughput. If you understand these terms already, bear with me. Bandwidth is a fixed amount of data speed you pay for and receive from your Internet Service Provider. Throughput is a measurement of data speeds within your local home, or small business network. It's common to refer to Internet speed as bandwidth and internal network speed as throughput. For example: Your router may support a theoretical throughput speed of 450Mbps, but your Internet connection may only have bandwidth rates of 20Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps for uploads.

Measuring and Improving Bandwidth
When it comes to improving Internet bandwidth, that performance does not significantly change with any real tweaking, because, as mentioned, the data rate is fixed from your ISP. However, there are ways to optimize and monitor bandwidth.

A good, robust router may help improve your Internet connection with features such as Quality-of-Service (QoS) and help route traffic better between the Internet and your internal home or small business network. When I upgraded my router, which was a little over five years old, to a new, dual-band premium router with QoS, my Internet performance perked up a bit.

Of course it's fairly easy to measure your Internet speed with online tools such as speedtest.net. Hint: to get a good measure of your Internet speed, take several measurements at different times of the day on weekends and weekdays. (Also, take a look at which ISPs PCMag readers rated the fastest.)

Measuring Throughput
Measuring your wireless network throughput is a different story. What is wireless throughput? That's the measurement of data rate between network devices within your home or small business network, also referred to as your LAN (Local Area Network—different from your Internet bandwidth, or WAN (Wide Area Network) connection speed.

So why only measure a network's wireless performance? Why not measure the speed of wired devices? For instance, why not measure how fast the data transfer rate is between a computer you have connected via an Ethernet cable to a LAN port on your router and a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device you may also have connected to the router?

Because that speed, like Internet bandwidth, is fixed. Most current laptops, desktops, and NASes—really any computer with an Ethernet port made in the last five years or so, likely has a Gigabit Ethernet port. If it's connected to a router that also has Gigabit Ethernet, then the connection (the data rate) between the computer and the router is Gigabit speed—1000Mbps. Now remember, if you have a slower, older port on a computer, one that is only Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) and you connect it via wire to a router that has Gigabit Ethernet, the connection rate will only be 100Mbps, not Gigabit speed of 1000Mbps. The network speed golden rule is that your network is only as fast as your slowest connection.

I test for throughput and performance for all the wireless routers and NAS devices that come into PCMag's lab for review. For routers, I use Ixia's IxChariot tool which measures the performance of data streams sent between two network devices (called endpoints). It's a great tool, because with it you can simulate all types of traffic—such as VoIP or gaming traffic—and find it out how different types of network data can impact network performance.

However, Ixia can take a while to learn and is an expensive utility. To get a good measure of your network throughput, you can use a test I use in cases where I don't have Ixia handy or for home testing.

Here's how it works: Take two network devices and wirelessly connect one your router (we'll deem this Device 1) and using an Ethernet cable, connect the second device (Device 2) to one of the LAN ports on your router.

Set up a network share folder on Device 2 so you can access it from Device 1. In Windows Explorer, this is done by creating a folder, right-clicking on it, clicking the 'Sharing' tab, and then the 'Share' button. In the image below, I created a folder called 'testshare' and gave Read/Write permissions to 'Everyone' on my network (you can remove or change permissions after testing for security, but for the test, Device 1 will need permission to write to the share).

From Device 1, you can browse through Windows Explorer for the newly created share (or map a drive to it).

Once you can open the Device 2 share on Device 1, you will want to copy a relatively large file from Device 1 to Device 2's share. I use a 1.5GB video clip for this test. During the copy, you will time how long it takes for the file copy to complete.

This gives a baseline of how fast it takes your wireless network to move data from one device to another. Let's say a 1.5GB file take 2 minutes to wirelessly copy from Device 1 to Device 2. You then want to perform some quick calculations:

First, convert GB to MB (I use an online converter like this).

1.5GB is 1536 MB. Since we want to get the MB per second rate; convert minutes into seconds. You then end up with the formula: 1536 (MB)/120 (seconds) = 12.8 MBps.

For the data speed rate, we then want to convert MBps into Mbps (sometimes shown as Mbit/s). 1 MBps (megabyte, being a data storage measurement) equals 8 megabits per second (megabit is a data transfer speed measurement, which is what you want to note).

Therefore: 12.8*8= 102.4 Mbps.

You can also just plug the numbers into an online converter like this one.

Interpreting the Results
Now, 102.4 Mbps is a decent throughput rate especially for a router with a theoretical speed of 300 Mbps and with Device 1 and Device 2 connected to the 2.4GHz band. In general, I like to see somewhere near half of the maximum throughput the router's manufacturer states the router can reach (that rate is only in a testing environment free of any Wi-Fi interference. You will never see that speed in real life).

I can almost hear some of you saying, 'But Wireless Witch, Windows already shows me how fast my wireless network connection is.' This is a reference to the little Wi-Fi icon in the bottom-right of the System Tray which, if you click on your connection and then right click on 'Status' looks like this:

What that typically shows you is the connection rate between the PC's adapter and the router, and does not give an actual measure of throughput performance when data packets are flying about!

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I also like to perform the file copy test on the 5GHz band as well. You should see some performance gains at 5GHz as long as the devices you are testing with are not too far from the Wi-Fi router (the 5GHz band has shorter range.) Also, you should test different scenarios—do the copy test when you have several devices and users connected to your network or while you are streaming music or video from a media player. Once you have a baseline, you can see how streaming multimedia or having multiple users connected at once impacts bandwidth. You can then tweak settings like QoS in the router, to see if you can improve throughput.