What is Reddit's opinion of Ekahau HeatMapper?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

That's the beauty of it - you don't need GPS. By using a stereoscopic imaging system your camera can easily see that you are in a hallway that is six feet wide with doors every 15 feet. You don't care about the lat/long inside the building, you only care that after walking 20 feet down the hall you drop to -78dB.

> For example if the wifi strength is strong then the access point is likely in plain sight but if it dips off, there's likely an obstruction, and simply walking around a house or building with multiple access points could generate a semi-accurate indoor map.

This is the best (free) heatmapper I have used. If you have an imagefile with a floorplan you can import that, then walk around and take samples every few feet and generate a floorplan with WiFi strength superimposed on it. The problem is that unless you have that floorplan already in digital format you have to create one. By adding the stereo imaging, you can generate the floorplan and the heat map simultaneously, something which is infinitely useful.

Ekahau HeatMapper is free to use but not open sourced. (http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper)

Never tried it out but I'm happy with the professional SiteSurvey, which is the big brother

What is in your walls that it would take more than one wireless access point for 1300 square feet? I've got probably almost 2000 square feet in a two story house plus a detached garage and two ASUS APs cover the whole house, backyard and garage.

I agree you need to get a heat map. Start with only one wireless router, your main one, plugged in and see how it turns out.

Edit: Try this. You can draw up a rough schematic of your home, then you walk around with a laptop and just click where you are on the schematic. It uses the wifi antenna to calculate signal strength in each area and builds a heat map. I would initially disconnect your two range extenders and see how you do with the one AP.

I have an ASUS RT-AC66U as a primary router and an N66U as an AP. I can go two houses down the street in either direction before my wifi disconnects.

Here's one that's free:

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

You bring in a floor plan, and walk around and click on the plan where you are. It reads the Wifi signal and fills in a heatmap.

Ekahau Heat Mapper is pretty good.

I was able to use to locate the access points in a warehouse when I had no idea where they were. The tool is a little quirky, and your "survey report" is literally a screenshot, but it's not bad for free.

This may help you get close to them. An android plus a scanning app would do the same.

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

Do you know what brand of wifi? if so, you can lookup the MAC addresses the company uses, and then arp for those MAC addresses on your switches.

Its not simulation software, But Ekahau Heatmapper can display the coverage for your Wi-Fi access points. It's free and you can import a map/picture then walk around the building to map out the coverage.

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper#!download-3

Here you go, free wireless heatmapper, just upload floor plans, draw walls with materials and add AP model. Should give you a decent idea of where to place APs. The perimeter of the building is typically for when you're deploying location based services.

Presence detectors that I have read about usually use RFID tags (passive and active). You could use triangulation or an RSSI measurement to detect proximity or spatial location. Then a heatmap could be made, for example a wi-fi heat map can be made by walking your laptop around.

More advanced would be systems that try to detect people behind concrete walls. MIT's Lincoln Labs "x-ray" system uses the S-Band (2-4 GHz) to see through walls.

What exactly are you trying to do?

EDIT: With ultrasound you typically have very narrow beams, so you need to sweep through the room with an array of transducers with beamforming or the like. You'd also have to do some processing on the return signals. A simple idea might be to create a baseline "image" of a room (echo and reverberation profile, aka room impulse response) and when it changes you'd know something in the room has changed.

thank you for yor explanation, it helped a lot. If you see three different WiFi names on your phone this just means that he has put up three different networks. they might very well merge together and leave the house as a single connection, therefore a single account (in the sense that only one internet bill is being issued to that household).

Now why would one do that? Maybe there are different access points distributed over the house to increase coverage and they are named differently to make it easier to connect to the right one in a given location. Maybe they operate at different frequencies to balance the load of the clients. maybe there is one that passes trough a vpn to bypass geoblocking to acces foreign netflix. I am not saying this is what is being done, but there are certainly legitimate reasons for there being three networks. If you want to get to the bottom of it, i suggest you install inSSIDer (for Windows) and check if all the networks are indeed the same strenght and channel. maybe even send me a screenshot. if this does not satisfy you you can use ekahau heatmapper (for windows) to map out the apartment and find out where the wifi devices are located. If you have done that and need help interpreting the results, feel free to post here

Start here for a basic understanding of 2.4 and 5ghz channels and how they are laid out and can interfere with each other: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/179344-how-to-boost-your-wifi-speed-by-choosing-the-right-channel

Then choose a tool from here based on which device you use: http://www.howtogeek.com/197268/how-to-find-the-best-wi-fi-channel-for-your-router-on-any-operating-system/

Make the adjustment to the best channel for your local enviroment within your router and remeasure using the tool you previously selected. If you want to get really granular, use this http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

>could it be a hardware problem?

While not common it does happen. I had a router that I suddenly couldn't connect to, one of it's transmitters went bad.

More likely that, since the different devices have different hardware, the hardware in the laptop isn't as good at picking up the signal in that location as the other devices. Not all WiFi hardware is equal.

Get a program for the laptop that will measure the signal strength. The "bars" on devices are, at best, a rough measure of signal strength. One such program is Heatmapper. Here's a walkthrough on how to use it: How to Create a Wi-Fi Heatmap

Another good one, and easier to use, is InSSider. They had a free version but discontinued it some time ago. The free version is still available on some sites, such as Techspot.

For the Wifi part i can recommend creating a heatmap with the ekahau heatmapper. http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper#!overview-0 At a previous job the interns afterwards used this heatmap to add other network equipment based on existing documentation with MS Visio. Not the finest solution (because if you want to change stg on the wifi side you have to do a heatmap again and add it as background in visio). A free equivalent would be Dia (http://dia-installer.de/), but tbh i like the handling of Visio more.

What is the enviroment? House with brick walls? Three story house? Apartment with several dozen other wireless signals clogging the airwaves?

Are you using 2.4 or 5 Ghz?

Does it work fine when you're near the router and only drop out as you start moving away?

Are any other electronics interfering, cordless phone, microwave, etc?

There are a number of tools for measuring signal strength, both for Windows and Android, have you used something like that to see where the signal's weak?

One I found and have been meaning to try, but haven't yet, is Ekahau's Heatmapper.

> Hey guys, > > > > I have installed quite a few Unifi Wifi access points at a local business and was wanting to get a heatmap of the facility. Going through the forums on Unifi website I found this one suggested in the forums. > > > > http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper > > > > but as you can see Windows.... does anyone know of one for linux.. google search reveals little help... > > > > Thanks > > > > Naelr

Good idea memnoch_proxy heading that way now

You need to turn the other devices off, using MAC filtering they will still be connecting to the access point.

Heat map: http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

You'll soon see if it is interference with heat map.

If they're in standby, their utilization should be little to nothing. Try using a heatmapper to see if the area you're in is rather poor in performance.

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

Enter your email and you'll get the download link for the free version

Walk around and you can generate a map of signal strength in your house.

You'll need a floorplan of some type to make this effective.

This link has a nice demo heatmapper that you put on your laptop and load a floor plan in and then walk around clicking on the map to provide a heatmap of the office. You may have your radios too close together, I have had this issue when upgrading APs using the old locations. I had to lower the power levels to make sure that I was not blowing the other APs out of the water. Also check to make sure that your radios are not overlapping channels. Even with Auto settings selected you could be hopping around channels trying to find a clear one a lot of the time. I have not used the AC version form unifi but have used other products from them.

Try this. http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

See if you just happen to be bumping into a dead zone or if someone else's network is bumping you off and what channels are in use.

Actually, there is. While it requires you to have a blueprint allready, which can be a bit of a pain. Regardless, ekahau heatmapper does the job.

Also, I'm not too sure about your foil reflector, antennas and radio waves are extremely dependent on size and spacing. Unless of course, you sized it out correctly.

I am listening to The Last Call right now on audible and it's a been very good read till now. I never wanted a cookie so bad. Use http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper to see what can be done in your office.

You'd want to look into bridging the routers (Wireless Bridge/AP Bridge/etc)

http://www.cyberciti.biz/networking/howto-connect-two-wireless-router-wirelessly-bridge-with-open-source-software/

If the router in your parents bedroom is from the ISP (like a combo router/modem) then likely it will not have the bridge feature you need. Your DLINK may need to be flashed to 3rd party firmware to support it as well.

In that case you may want to look at finding out ways to improve the signal. You could learn some WiFi analyzing techniques with heatmapping.

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

I have used this one its free and works just fine for a house or small business.

Hope this helps.

There's this one, it's pretty basic.

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

Here's a list, some may offer a trial license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wireless_site_survey_applications

If you are looking for a decent tool that is free, consider using Heatmapper by Ekahau. It's legit. They also have more fully featured options available (including a mobile Android app for $300).