Troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks at the protocol level involves the analysis of control, management, and data frames. When doing save-to-disk captures of these frames for analysis, files sizes can grow very rapidly because of the payloads that can be found in data frames. However, if you’re only interested in frame exchanges, and not so much about what the payload looks like, saving this data might be unnecessary.

WiFi Signal offers a simple integration with WiFi Explorer that allows it to automatically import and display annotations. Annotations in WiFi Explorer are used for assigning custom labels to a particular access point.

The latest version of WiFi Signal brings a new set of features that most users will find useful for monitoring and troubleshooting certain aspects of their Wi-Fi network, such as association and roaming. It also includes various UI fixes and improvements like dark mode support and a fully customizable status display.

One of the things I enjoy the most of writing apps is designing their app icons. In fact, I rarely can start writing any code until I come up with the app's name and icon. Of all the icons I have designed, the icon for Airtool is the one I like the most, followed by the icon for WiFi Explorer.

WiFi Explorer, as well as other wireless scanning tools, provides an option to display signal strength in dBm or percentage values. The purpose of this blog is to describe this conversion process in WiFi Explorer. It should also help clarify why percentage values in WiFi Explorer might look so different when we compare them to the values we see in other tools.

For Part 6 of this blog series I have two concept maps. The first concept map describes the format and function of a data frame, which is one of three types of frames defined by the 802.11 standard (the other two are management and control frames):

I want to thank the thousands of users for their support throughout all these years and also take the opportunity to make a big announcement. Starting today WiFi Explorer will have two distribution channels: Mac App Store and direct purchase (powered by Paddle).

The past two weeks I've been busy at work and also ironing some winkles on WiFi Explorer after the El Capitan upgrade, so I didn't have a chance to work on any new concept maps until today. So far we have learned about the physical and MAC layers, as well as the format and function of the 802.11 management frames. The concept map for this week (see below) describes the 802.11 control frame. The main goal of control frames is to help with the delivery of management and data frames.

Here's my next concept map. It's about the 802.11 management frame. This map took me a little longer to elaborate because there is a lot of technical details about management frames that it made it harder to summarize. Remember that the idea behind the concept map is not to fit every single detail into a map but to summarize and highlight the most important concepts and relationships. Thus, not every single information element (IE) is described here and instead it only describes a few of the basic IEs.

Continuing with this blog series, the concept map for this week is about the 802.11 MAC Sublayer. The map presents the basics of the 802.11 MPDU format, including types of frames, MAC addressing, frame fragmentation, and QoS capabilities.

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