Turn the Auto Reconfigure on, to ensure that as many wireless LANs as possible are detected.
Use a wireless card that reports noise levels. When the noise levels are high that means there are some interference.
After the installation a survey should be conducted to perform verification, which may be performed with Auto Reconfigure switched off.
Networks that are visible but not your own ones should not be used, to do that, go to the Network Control Panel and unbind TCP/IP from your wireless LAN card.
Wardriving:
Wardriving is the sport of detecting and/or locating wireless LANs. NetStumbler is a very popular tool for wardriving, because of its easy to use and GPS integration.
Use of GPS in wardriving:
When you are wardriving you drive around using a stumbling utility and record information from the nearby Access Points. Most stumbling utilities have the ability to add GPS location information to their log files, so that the geographical positions of the A.P.s stumbled so far can be retained and plotted in an electrical map.
Number of Channels:
The number of channels that can be currently detected are 3 which are 7 Andy-Ap, 10 Free Public WiFi and 11 hpsetup.
The SSID’s and MAC addresses and several other parameters can be seen in the figure below.
The various parameters that are seen along side the channels are MAC, SSID, Speed, Vendor, Type, Encryption, SNR, Signal+, Noise-, SNR+, First Seen, Last Seen, Signal, Noise, Flags, Beacon.
MAC: It’s the BSSID for MAC devices. The IEEE 802.11-2007 Wireless LAN specification defines a BSSID as the MAC address of the Station (STA) in an Access Point (AP) in an infrastructure mode BSS. This field uniquely identifies each BSS. There are different colours which represent various aspects of signal. Gray for example indicates that the item was not detected. Range of colours between Red and Green report the signal strength. A lock symbol appears if the encryption is on.
SSID: This is a Service Set Identifier which is used to identify a wireless LAN(802.11). Generally a device which intends to connect itself will receive a message from all the nearby access points which contain their SSID’s. It can choose one among them
Name: Name of the device.
Channel: This column displays all the channels which can see the device. The ‘+’ sign indicates that you were associated with you some point and the ‘*’ sign indicates that you are currently associated with the device.
Speed: This column indicates the highest reported bandwidth of the device. For 802.11b device using 802.11g networks the bandwidth is sometimes reported falsely.
Vendor: MAC vendor
Encryption: WEP will be displayed if encryption is enabled in the network.
SNR: The signal to noise ratio will be displayed here.
Signal+: The maximum signal value observed.
Noise-: The minimum noise observed
SNR+: The maximum Signal to noise ratio observed
First Seen: The time at which it is first observed
Last Seen: The time at which it is last observed
Signal: The current signal level
Noise: The current noise level
Flags: Capability flags in hexadecimal
Beacon: Beacon interval in Kµs
Analysis from the graph:
The green bar indicates the signal strength. Since it is high most of the time, it means we have good signal. The minor fluctuations indicate some variations of signal strengths. A purple bar
generally indicates loss of signal and in this case there is none. The changes in the strength of signal over a period of time are clearly indicated in the graph. By looking at the time line in the x-axis we can analyse the signal strength at a specific point in time.
