Does inconsistent Wi-Fi have you roaming around your home or office in search of a decent signal? Darien Graham-Smith reveals how to get a clear, complete and colourful picture of your wireless coverage
Patchy Wi-Fi is the bane of many households. You can pay considerable sums for a router with the latest technology, only to find that half of your home still gets iffy service.
If you want to improve matters, the first step is to identify exactly where your wireless coverage is strong and where it’s lagging. Professional network architects approach this sort of job by creating a heatmap of wireless signal strength across a business’ premises, revealing any areas of uneven coverage and potential locations where additional transmitters may be required. Here’s how to do the same for your own home, entirely for free.
Your first heatmap
You can create a simple heatmap using just a piece of paper, a pen and a smartphone or laptop. All you need to do is sketch out a floorplan of your home, then walk around it in real life, checking the reported signal strength of your wireless network as you go, and noting down your findings in the appropriate locations on the map.
The only catch is that most devices won’t show you detailed information about your wireless signal; you’ll have to install an app to access this technical data. One free option for Android is WiFi Analyser & Heatmap, available on Google Play from a developer called Webprovider.
This opens with a graphical display of visible networks; tap the 5GHz icon at the top right of the screen (assuming that’s the band you’re interested in), then tap the three-dots menu next to it and select “List”. You’ll now see details of all nearby networks, with a signal strength reading in dBm next to each one, plus a potentially useful rating of low, medium or high interference. iOS users can get similar information from Apple’s Airport Utility app, available as a free download from the App Store.
In Windows, the Wi-Fi icon in the system tray gives a broad representation of signal strength (depending on how many bars are solid black), but you can get a much more precise reading by opening a Command Prompt and typing netsh wlan show interfaces. This will return a list of technical statistics about your connection, including signal strength as a percentage.
For convenience, you could create a simple batch file that spews out a continual live reading, so you can just glance down at the screen to check the signal strength as
