Spectrum graphs are too much fun to play around with. The ability to visualize the invisible is a pretty awesome (and distracting) capability that spectrum analyzers offer. After this post, I’ll dive into more of the other features that Air Viewer has as we are making good progress on the rest of the app and I want to start highlighting those features more. But, just because it’s sooo much fun, let’s take one last look at some spectrum analysis capabilities by checking out Wi-Fi signatures. 🎉

The above screenshot was taken at my house. It’s a typical home environment… Lots of management overhead can be seen; all too common bad channel planning on 2.4 GHz (ISP technicians, IoT companies, and home router manufacturers – please please please remember 1, 6, 11 for 2.4 GHz 🙏); overall, not too much utilization at the moment.

Let’s see what happens as I switch to channel 36 – 48 range and I start a speed test on my laptop.

I’m pretty lucky as I don’t have a lot of neighboring networks on the 5 GHz band and my Google OnHub by Asus is free to broadcast on 80 MHz wide bonded channels. My download speeds clocked in at 40 Mbps – which is pretty awesome because that’s exactly what I pay my ISP for and you would typically expect throughput to dip as it transfers over Wi-Fi. The 80 MHz wide 5 GHz data transfer pays off in my home environment!

Now, let’s take a look at another laptop of mine connected to channel 1 on the 2.4 GHz band. I’ll do the same thing and run a speed test.

Did you see what I threw in there? A little non-Wi-Fi interference! Man-o-man that killed the Wi-Fi on channels 1 through 6. You can even see how some APs immediately tried to broadcast on channel 11.

I hope you enjoyed these updates on the spectrum analyzer piece! Next up, I plan on doing a video overview of the Networks tab in Air Viewer. Stay tuned!