Looking for a quick way to scan all Wi-Fi networks in your area and see what channels they are on? How about getting other information like SSID, Mac address, signal strength, company name, etc.? Nirsoft has released a new free tool called WifiInfoView that will give you detailed information about all the wireless networks around you.
When you download it, you can just double click to launch the program, you don’t need to install it. This is really useful because you can copy it to a USB drive or upload it to your Dropbox folder and run it on any computer from anywhere.
The main interface will automatically start listing all wireless networks found by the program. As you can see, there is very detailed information here and you can add additional columns if you like. By default, you can see the SSID along with the signal strength in green bars, MAC address, physical layer type (a / b / g / n), signal quality, frequency (2 GHz or 5 GHz), channel and company. (D-Link, Netgear, etc.). You can also select other columns including router model, router name, security, first discovered, last discovered, and counter of discoveries.
Please note that WifiInfoView will only work with Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/10. It does not support Windows XP because it uses a new wireless API that is not available in Windows XP. If you click on Options, you can also select one of the very handy Summary modes.
For example, if you switch to the channel summary mode, the program will group all wireless networks into channels and then show you their number:
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As you can see, there are 25 wireless networks operating on channel 25, 10 networks on channel 11, and so on, etc. If you feel there is wireless interference from another network, you can also check how many other routers are operating on the same channel as your router.
If you go to the “Company Summary” view, you can get a list grouped by router manufacturer:
If you switch to PHY types mode, you can easily see the number of networks working in wireless G or wireless N, etc.
Overall, this is a very good utility for quickly getting detailed information on all wireless networks in your area. Enjoy!
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