Wi-Fi scanning is one of the basic functions in a wireless network. It is the mechanism by which a client device (e.g. computer) or an application discovers the wireless networks that are in range of the Wi-Fi adapter. In this blog post, I will briefly talk about how Wi-Fi scanning works, and then I will focus on how this process is accomplished in WiFi Explorer Pro, including the pros and cons of each scan mode.

WiFi Explorer Pro takes the code base of WiFi Explorer and adds a set of features that makes it the right tool for WLAN and IT professionals. You can use WiFi Explorer Pro for preliminary assessments, to help design and validate wireless networks installations, as well as to identify channel conflicts, overlapping, poor signal quality and other issues that may be affecting the connectivity or performance of your home, office or enterprise wireless network.

Setapp is a new subscription service from MacPaw that will offer up to 300 handpicked, high quality macOS apps, including WiFi Explorer, for a flat monthly fee.

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).