Wireless Hacks

Network Detection on Mac OS X

Find out everything you ever wanted to know about the networks available in your area.

If you are simply looking for any available network, you can usually get by with the built-in AirPort client. But if you are building your own network, or troubleshooting someone else’s, you need much more detail than the standard clients provide. In particular, knowing which networks are in range and which channels they are using can be invaluable when determining where to put your own equipment. Here are two very easy-to-use survey tools for OS X that give you a far better idea of what’s really going on.

MacStumbler

Sharing nothing but a name with the very popular NetStumbler [Hack #21], MacStumbler (http://www.macstumbler.com/) is probably the most popular network scanner for OS X. It is simple to use, and provides the details that you are most likely interested in: available networks, the channels they use, and their received signal strength. It also displays received noise, whether WEP is enabled, and a bunch of other useful details. See Figure 3-14.

Figure 3-14. MacStumbler’s main screen.

Like many OS X apps, MacStumbler is capable of text-to-speech, so it will even speak the ESSIDs of networks that it finds as they appear. Although it is still in beta, I have found MacStumbler to be a very reliable tool. It currently supports network scanning using only the ...