Puneet Varma (Editor)

WiFi Explorer

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Original author(s)
  
Adrian Granados

Written in
  
Objective-C

Development status
  
Active

WiFi Explorer

Initial release
  
January 17, 2012; 5 years ago (2012-01-17)

Stable release
  
2.3 / March 22, 2017; 5 days ago (2017-03-22)

Preview release
  
2.2 / September 7, 2016; 6 months ago (2016-09-07)

WiFi Explorer is a wireless network scanner tool for OS X that can help users identify channel conflicts, overlapping and network configuration issues that may be affecting the connectivity or performance of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks.

Contents

History

WiFi Explorer began as a desktop alternative to WiFi Analyzer, an iPhone app for wireless network scanning that was pulled out from Apple's App Store in March, 2010 due to the use of private frameworks. Since its first release, WiFi Explorer incorporated features that were not included in the last available version of WiFi Analyzer, such as support for 5 GHz networks and 40 MHz channel widths. Starting in version 1.5, WiFi Explorer includes support for 802.11ac networks, as well as 80 and 160 MHz channel widths.

Features

  • Displays various network parameters:
  • Network name (SSID) and MAC address (BSSID)
  • Manufacturer
  • AP name for certain Cisco and Aruba devices
  • Beacon interval
  • Mode (802.11a/b/g/n/ac)
  • Band (2.4 GHz ISM and 5 GHz UNII-1, 2, 2 Extended, and 3)
  • Channel width (20, 40, 80, and 160 MHz)
  • Secondary channel offset
  • Security mode (WEP, WPA, WPA2)
  • Support for Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS)
  • Supported basic, min and max data rates
  • Advertised 802.11 Information Elements
  • Graphical visualization of channel allocation, signal strength or Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
  • Different sorting and filtering options
  • Displays signal strength and noise values as percentage or dBm
  • Ability to save and load results for later analysis
  • Metrics and network details can be exported to a CSV file format
  • Selectable and sortable columns
  • Adjustable graph timescales
  • Editable column for annotations, comments, etc.
  • Customizable network colors
  • Full screen mode
  • Comprehensive application's help

    • Limitations

    Due to limitations of Apple's CoreWLAN framework, WiFi Explorer is unable to detect hidden networks (except when associated) and does not support external (USB) wireless adapters.

    System requirements

  • OS X 10.7 or higher (64-bit)

    • References

    WiFi Explorer Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA