Know Your 802.11 Surroundings With Xirrus Wifi Monitor

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Freeware

Know Your 802.11 Surroundings With Xirrus Wifi Monitor

by Lee Mathews Jul 23rd 2008

xirrus wifi tool is like radar for hotspots

Widgets are cool, especially when they do something useful - and even cooler when they look quasi-military.

Xirrus Wifi Monitor is available as a Yahoo Widget (for Mac, too) and a Vista Sidebar Gadget. It sits at the side of your screen scanning at your specified interval and updating its tiny radar screen with new hits. In our testing, it did a very good job at plotting the physical location of nearby APs. To our dismay the widget doesn't actually animate sweeps - too bad, because that would be pretty sweet.

Don't think it's just eye-candy. Wifi Monitor also provides you a ton of statistcal data about your access point's capabilities, your wireless connection, even a glossary of wireless terms. The details screen also allows you to disable your wireless adapter and to connect/disconnect (forwards you to your OS's wireless connection manager).

Well worth the download - if not for functionality, at least for its good looks!

Tags: gadget, widget, wifi, wireless

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Brett said 5:36PM on 7-23-2008

> To our dismay the widget doesn't actually animate
> sweeps - too bad, because that would be pretty sweet

Options, sweep type. Looks animated to me.

Lee Mathews said 5:52PM on 7-23-2008

After trying to figure this out with Brett (mine never animated), he suggests closing and restarting the sidebar until it does. That got his working! Animated sweeping is sweet.

Dullest said 10:09AM on 7-25-2008

Got the sweeping or sonar action to work which was pretty cool, but in terms of locating the hot-spots it was pretty off. Perhaps my antenna throws it off?

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