The next step in my project is to survey my current WiFi to see what is happening there. My first task, using Lee Hutchinson’s guidance, was to buy a license to NetSpot so I could do a Site Survey and see what my WiFi was doing. I downloaded it, bought my license, and was on my way.
NetSpot
I have to say, this is really nice software. I played with it for a bit, then decided to give a survey a try. When you start a survey, you add a zone, which, in my case, would be a floor. I chose ‘Closed office space or apartment’ when I started:
You can see that it can do some heavy-duty stuff here. My first thought was to draw a map with the ‘draw it’ option. I gave it a try, but It would have taken me a while to do, and so I scoured my office for a floorplan of one of the floors of the house. I was finally able to locate one that was not scribbled on, took a pic with my phone, and loaded it. Then I used their clever tool where you draw an arbitrary line on the map and indicate what that true length is. From there, it can gauge the size of the map. Then you can add networks to scan, and finally set up active scanning. I kept defaults, and did not opt to do an active scan (which would measure upload and download speeds).
First Try
Then, I did my survey by walking around the second floor and sampling the WiFi. It turned out like this:
I don’t really know if this is good or bad, yet. I feel that since my experience with my WiFi is not so good, the fact that these are in the middle of the range is about what I expect. The survey shows the overall SNR (Signal To Noise) of my 5G network, which is broadcast by 3 APs (Access Points), one in the attic above, one on the main floor, below, and one on that floor in the yellow spot in the lower left corner. Note also that you can see a thick wall about 1/3 up the page – that’s the original back wall of the house, made of brick.
I can’t really do justice to just how awesome this tool is, though. I was able, in just a few minutes, to get a baseline, with little or no effort. The visualizations are pretty amazing. I’ll show those more when I do the full survey.
Plans
Much to my dismay, this old plan was the only one I had of any of the four floors of my house. Given my love of making plans, it’s a shock that I don’t have any others I can find. Truly a shock. Thus, we will divert briefly into a quick digression on drawing floorplans.
Now, a rational person might just grab a tool off the web and use that to do a floorplan, but that’s not how I roll: I’m a pencil and paper type of guy, so I’ll do a set of drawings.
So I set out to assemble my tools. You don’t need much for this, really:
- Graph paper. Get 1 inch graph paper
- Square. Just a regular Utrecht square
- Pencil. Bic mechanical pencil
- Scale Rule. I use one of these: it’s great. It was also hidden in one of my kids’ toy boxes since they like the numbers and the colors.
- A measuring tool. If you care at all about measuring (and who doesn’t, really?), you need one of these:
So now, with my tools collected, I’m off to do some drawing. I’ll cover that next.
What I’m listening to as I do this:
PowerQuest: It’s middle-of-the-road fantasy/melodic heavy metal. I’m a big DragonForce fan, and I thought these guys sounded similar, and it turns out that a lot of their members came from DragonForce. Not quite as awesome, though. DragonForce is awesome.