Wi-Fi On Radar
Here’s a wireless utility with a difference. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor generates a radar-like display to show all of the wireless networks in range of your laptop. By translating relative signal strength into range it shows, in a rather eye-catching way, which ones are likely to give you the best connection. For obvious reasons – unless you have a rotating and highly directional Wi-Fi antenna on your PC the display cannot tell you which direction the access point actually is, but it looks great. Versions of Wi-Fi monitor are available for Windows Mac and Linux, and the only catch is the XP version requires that you install Yahoo Widget Framework, which adds another 15Mb to the download, (the Vista version installs as a sidebar Gadget)
Why has everyone only been talking about this recently?
It’s been out for ages.
This wi-fi on radar is neat, but I would like to see an x-y chart instead of a round display, organized to signal strength and data rate with color coding and icons for other info. The chart should be styled the same way, and operate the same with moving dots representing signals, but would make more sense if it showed more than just the strength of a signal. Maybe Xirrus could offer this as a skin? Looks like all they have now is a choice of color.