What Is a WiFi Mapper and Why It’s Useful?

What Is a Wi-Fi Mapper?

A WiFi mapper, sometimes called simply a heatmapper, is a software application that can create a WiFi heat map, which is a special WiFi coverage map that visually highlights all areas of signal weakness and dead zones.

Heat maps are used to make adjustments and improve wireless coverage. It used to be that only trained networking professionals knew how to create heat maps using specialized software that would be completely inaccessible to regular home users. But times have changed, and heat map software is now more accessible than ever.

That’s great news for regular home users who are not satisfied with their WiFi and would like to improve it without calling over a technician and potentially paying hundreds of dollars for a simple fix.

Ekahau Product Suite is a powerful collection of tools for designing, analyzing, and optimizing Wi-Fi networks. The suite includes Ekahau AI Pro, a software solution that uses artificial intelligence to create predictive wireless network designs.

Ekahau AI Pro boasts AI-assisted predictive wireless network design capabilities, network upgrade simulations, and custom reports detailing the performance health of your network. It supports multiple buildings and thousands of access points per project, so it’s more than capable of meeting the needs of even the most demanding enterprise users.

To take advantage of all these features, you need the Ekahau Sidekick 2 device to collect data — a regular WiFi adapter won't do the job. For enterprise customers, who are the target audience of this WiFi mapper app, the purchase of Sidekick 2 won't break the bank. For smaller organizations or home users, however, the extra (steep) expense is very difficult to justify when there are other WiFi mappers that do the job just as well for a fraction of the cost.

Wi-Fi SweetSpots Map was created to help iPhone users discover the best place for their wireless router. It lets you quickly and easily overlay WiFi strength signal information on a map, allowing you to see at a glance where your signal is the strongest and weakest.

Unfortunately, the resulting WiFi heat map is a basic two-color gradient of a fairly low resolution, so it’s not really suitable for complex troubleshooting and advanced users.

How To Create a Wireless Network Map with NetSpot

Creating a map of your wireless network is an effective way of evaluating your network's performance and troubleshooting weak spots. So, a good wireless network mapper can come in handy and will allow you to visualize your WiFi coverage, your signal strength, noise and interference across your entire network area.

NetSpot is a Wi-Fi mapper app for Mac and Windows (also available for Android and iOS). It allows you to take a complete site survey of your network and view the following WiFi heatmap visualizations:

• Signal-to-noise ratio: this wireless network map highlights your signal level as compared to your noise level (for macOS only);

• Signal level: this map highlights your signal level;

• Signal-to-interference ratio: this map highlights co-channel interference from other radio transmitters.

The PRO and Enterprise versions of NetSpot offer additional visualizations, and active scanning and troubleshooting features. It provides 2 additional noise level and quantity of access points visualizations, 3 Active Scanning visualizations and 6 additional Troubleshooting visualizations:

• Quantity of access points: this map highlights the number of access points (or routers) detected at each measurement point;

• Noise level: this wireless network map highlights your noise levels (for macOS only);

• Download speed: this Wi-Fi map highlights Internet download speeds recorded during an active scan;
• Upload speed: this map highlights Internet upload speeds recorded during an active scan;
• Wireless transmit rate: this map highlights the Internet wireless transmit rate recorded during an active scan;
• Troubleshooting issues with SNR: this Wi-Fi map makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot weak areas of signal-to-noise ratio coverage (for macOS only);

• Troubleshooting low signal level: this map makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot areas of weak signal level;

• Troubleshooting high noise level: this map makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot areas of high noise level (for macOS only);

• Troubleshooting overlapping channels (SIR): this Wi-Fi map makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot areas of high co-channel interference;
• Troubleshooting low download rate: this map makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot areas of low download speeds;

• Troubleshooting low upload rate: this map makes it easier to identify and troubleshoot areas of low upload speeds.

Conclusion

Wi-Fi mapping can help you significantly improve the performance of all wireless devices. As long as you equip yourself with the best Wi-Fi heatmap software, then you should be able to create a Wi-Fi heat map in a matter of minutes and without any special knowledge, making the activity well worth the little effort required.