The practical goal is to find the best wifi network to connect to when you are out and about and want to take advantage of the internet connection of a free wireless network that is not password protected. Secondary objective is to verify the power of your home wireless network .
But before seeing which tools can be used to distinguish the wifi networks from each other and find the one that is not only active and free but also faster, let's see a minimum of understanding what we are talking about.
In two articles I have already talked about how to optimize the wifi reception of your computer: once reporting a tool that avoids the slowdowns caused by the continuous search for available networks by stopping the WLAN service (in XP Zero Configuration); the other on how to install a wireless network and a wifi router.
In the latter I said that the radio signal can be disturbed by physical obstacles such as doors and windows and, above all by other radio sources such as portable telephones, electric gates, microwave ovens.
If you find yourself in an area full of interference, with many Wifi Access Points, routers or network cards (as in a large office), the interference could degrade the wifi signal of your network.
Not only therefore the PC goes crazy in identifying many available networks but the transmission of the radio signal arrives disturbed .
Unlike an FM radio, where each station has its own well-defined channel, for the wifi signal one channel also crosses into others and crowds are easily created.
The choice of the channel therefore becomes important to find the best network to connect to and not to decrease the power of your wireless network at home.
READ ALSO: Differences between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks
In practical terms, on 2.4 GHz type wifi networks (on 5 GHz ones this is not needed), the connection quality does not depend only on the strong signal, but also on the channel, which is not used too much by the other available networks.
I talked about this topic in more depth in the update to this article on how to avoid interference on wifi from neighbors' networks ).
Below, however, we see the PC programs to find out the wifi signal strength on the PC and also all the details of each wifi network, including also the most free channel .
The most famous of them is called NetStumbler, an old award-winning program, also used as a basis for cracking networks because it identifies them in every detail.
NetStumbler however is no longer developed, it works well on Windows XP but has problems on Vista and Windows 7 so it takes some new alternatives.
1) The best program, in my opinion, is inSSIDer, free and open source for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10.
Once the program is installed, from the drop-down menu you must choose the wifi network card and then start the scan of nearby networks.
Even if the program lists a lot of information, there is no difficulty in understanding which is the best network because there is a nice graph in real time that shows which is more powerful among the wireless networks found and which channel they use .
The information includes: the MAC address (physical address of the network card), the SSID (the name of the network), the channel, the signal level, the type of encryption (whether protected or not), the transmission speed.
In addition, inSSIDer also supports a GPS connected to the computer to identify where the access point is physically, with terrestrial coordinates.
The first of the two graphs, the one on the left, shows the trend over time of the signal strength for each network, while the one on the right shows the transmission band on the channel used and is also useful for checking for interference.
Just for the record, the 2.4 GHz band is the standard one in Europe and Italy and 13 channels are available (not so many).
The important thing is to know that, in theory, the signal of a channel borders on the 4 on the right and on the 4 on the left therefore, an ideal environment should no longer have three Access Points and these three must work on channels distant from each other (1, 6, 11 or 2, 7, 12 or 3, 8, 13).
In practice, if you have to set up your router at home and live in a crowded area, then you should pay attention to the channel used.
2) NetSurveyor is an excellent program similar to Inssider and, perhaps, simpler to use, with a graphic indication of the best channels to connect to on the wifi network.
3) Another excellent program to scan networks and find the best one to connect to is Vistumbler, for Windows Vista and Windows 7 which uses the Windows netsh command to track statistics and control the power of a wifi .
4) Xirrus Wifi Inspector is an excellent tool for checking the wifi networks in circulation and finding the best one depending on the signal strength, the channel used and so on.
Obviously it identifies the freely accessible and protected ones.
Very nice on Xirrus the sonar style graphics showing the position of the Access Points in a radar around the computer.
Xirrus is also mentioned in the article on how to improve the wifi signal .
5) Wifichannelmonitor is a very simple portable program, which once launched presents itself with an empty window and just press the F6 key on the keyboard or click on the Capture button in the toolbar to open a window where you can select the type of network card and start monitoring.
For each device connected to the network and for each detected wifi, you can see the signal strength and the communication channel.
6) WifiInfoview is a small lightweight portable tool that allows you to see all the details of nearby wifi networks and that allows you to read the signal strength on each network channel, from 1 to 100 depending on when it gets better.
7) Wireless NetView is a Nirsoft tool, very light, very simple and portable, which cannot be installed and which finds networks nearby with detailed information.
Although it gives a judgment on signal strength, it does not make bandwidth comparisons and interference.
8) A very simple portable tool called OutSSIDer allows you to scan the available networks and find the free and functioning ones .
How many times have you found networks that seemed accessible without a password and instead the internet didn't work "> create the wifi network map to find out where the signal is strongest.
10) Wireless Network Watcher, finally, is the program that shows who is using your wifi network, to find out who is stealing the wireless signal and therefore part of the network bandwidth.
11) Wifi Analyzer is an app for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, free, from Microsoft, really simple that shows the channels of the wifi network and tells us which one is the best.
In the case of a 2.4 Ghz wifi network, it will tell us if it is convenient to configure the router to transmit on channel 1, 6 or 11.
In conclusion, who uses the wireless router, could make a check on the channels while when you are around, using programs like InSSIDer before choosing which network to connect to (if there is this possibility of choice), is absolutely decisive.
If you have things to add or corrections to do, comments are available.
This is just one of the 10 ways to amplify and improve home Wifi
In another article, the best online services to find free hotspots and access points around.
