iPad WiFi Scanner and Site Survey Tool
iPad WiFi Scanner and Site Survey Tool
Why I like the iPad as a platform for WiFi tools such as a WiFi scanner or WiFi site survey tool:
Display – Nice big display compared to the iPhone. Anyone that has conducted WiFi site surveys for millions of square feet knows that having a big laptop screen is useful. The 9.7-inch (diagonal) multi-touch display isn’t huge but should work well for WiFi site surveys.
Size and Weight – The bigger the screen the better..but with size comes weight. While having a 16 inch screen is ideal..an 8 pound laptop for site surveys feels like a 1000 pounds after a few hours of surveying. For me, the perfect screen size for a WiFi Scanner/Site Survey laptop is around 13 inches. The iPad’s 9.7 inch diagonal screen may end up being a little small but for most scanning and surveying it should work well. At around 9.56 inches by 7.47 inches and 1.6 pounds for the WiFi + 3G model the iPad is perfect for carrying around all day long.
Battery and Power – Per Apple’s website the iPad “has up to 10 hours of surfing the web on W-Fi”. Even if the battery life is closer to 7 hours…that is enough for a full day of WiFI scanning and surveying. When scanning a wireless card isn’t transmitting so hopefully the iPad’s battery life is closer to 10 hours when used as a scanner.
Processor and Performance – For large survey projects it helps to have a powerful processor that is responsive when clicking/tapping the screen and also can handle the larger number access points and WiFi devices that sometimes need to get tracked during scanning and surveying. The 1GHz Apple A4 processor is unknown since it is so new so hopefully it is a powerful as marketed by Apple.
Wireless Features – The iPad supports 802.11 a/b/g/n so it has all the capabilities needed for the major WiFi types deployed by organizations today. The iPad will connect at the full speeds to any type of network for any speed testing or active surveying.
iPad Is Value Priced and Feature Rich
At $499 ($523.95 after tax) the iPad with Wi-Fi only and 16GB of storage is a great platform for WiFi tools. We hope to port our very popular (and free) WiFi Scanner app for Snow Leopard to iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and add/enhance the tool for wireless site surveys.
iPad/iPhone OS SDK for WiFi Tools
Currently there is is no way to access the information we need from the iPhone/iPad OS without using a private framework. This isn’t a big deal in terms of creating the application but if we want the app available in the App Store then we have play by Apple’s rules which means waiting for a updated OS and SDK to be released. Apple usually realeases major iPhone/iPad OS updates once a year around this time so hopefully the next major release will provide a documented way to access to 802.11/WiFi information that meets our needs for porting our WiFi Scanner to the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch platform.
iPad/iPhone WiFi Scanner/Site Survey Tool Features Requests
If you have any feature requests for a WiFi Scanner and Site Survey Tool on the iPad let us know. Check out our WiFi Scanner for Mac OS X for what is possible.
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Filed under: WLAN Design, WLAN Site Survey, WLAN Tools
Zaib,
Great idea there. I’ve been thinking the very same idea — ever since the first viewing of the iPad. It *will* make a great Wireless Analysis and Site Survey tool… again, *if* Apple releases an SDK that allows access to that information ‘legally’.
I spent a huge amount of time designing the capabilities, screens, variables, outputs, etc. for an ‘Ultimate WiFi Analyzer’ tool for the iPhone, but luckily was warned away from developing it because of this ‘Private Framework’ issue.
But I do have all of that work completed and ready to implement on an iPad platform as soon as Apple approves.
I’d be glad to share this information with you so we could get the best possible tool out to the Wireless LAN Professionals out there.
Keith
Send me your requests and we’ll see what we can do..the first cut will probably be a version of the WiFi Scanner using private framework and then we’ll wait for SJ to add what we need to SDK so we can take it to next level.
Or if you have tons of ideas and graphics…make it blog post.
I would also love to see this type of tool, including the ability to load a scaled jpg or .dwg file as a background image to indicate signal, RSSI, SNR on this map for later presentation to the client as a visual representation of the coverage. Pretty pictures would make it perfect, as that’s what helps get the idea of coverage across to the layman.
Is it possible at least to design an app that would display signal strength of detected wifi spots? That would help me walk around my work building to find the best location to sit with my Ipad during lunch. Map it with gps. Test wifi boost antennas, etc.
How about making this a true Wireless LAN site survey tool that allows you to load in bulding floor plans (pdf, png, jpg…) and walk about and touch locations where you 1) place the site survey access point and 2) where you are currently with the iPad. This plus predictive RF calculations would allow this device to be an excellent competitor to very expensive tools from AirMagnet, Ekahau or Motorola.
There are several WiFi stumblers available via Cydia on Jailbroken iPhones. For more details on jailbreaking see http://blog.iphone-dev.org/. Jailbroken software doesn’t need Apple’s permission and has been added to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a legal exception. You can’t yet jailbreak the latest iPhone firmware, 4.0.2, on the iPhone 4 or 3GS, but if you are running 4.0.1 or 4.0, you can jailbreak via jailbreakme.com and install the patch to the PDF exploit via Cydia (this patch is the difference between 4.0.1 and 4.0.2). iPhone 3G devices should be able to be jailbroken at any software version.
One of the better ones I’ve found is WiFiFoFum.
take a look at these:
Metageek Chanalyzer (spectrum analyzer)
Ekahau Site Survey + VisiWave (both good site survey tools and each one is good at one point over the other)
Cace Technologies WiFi Pilot (good at wifi sniffing, scanning, logging and troubleshooting)
They all do well in some portions of a site survey…but none do the work in full, plus you need a lot of external gadgets and a bulked windows based notebook; i’d pay $2k for a software i could buy for an ipad that could get the full job done…maybe even $10k to get it done and commercialize it, that’s a killer app for sure, and now with Autocad comming for ipads getting the 2D blueprints on an ipad would be so easy.
Yes that is plan…will take some time.