inSSIDer was developed by metageek as a reaction to the fact that NetworkStumbler was not further developed since 2004 and does not work well on the modern Windows operating systems. As a previous NetworkStumbler user I find inSSIDer rather superior. Presentation and features are excellent. It won the BOSSIE award (Best of Open Source Software). If you have a wireless network, you know the true meaning of frustration. If your house has than one story, or if rambles, you probably have dead spots where your wireless network doesn’t have a strong enough signal. In an apartment or an office in a shared building, you have more problems with competing networks as well. Trying to troubleshoot wireless networking can be a nearly impossible task. That’s where InSSIDer, a great piece of free software, comes in.
The first thing you see when starting the inSSIDer scan is a clearly organized GUI. The list of access points is shown at the top. The lower half shows two very informative graphs of the signal strength the discovered networks produce. While the left graph shows the history of the received network signal dBm strength, the right one classifies the networks by strength.
The top list of networks displays information like SSID, MAC address, channel and encryption etc. The list can be sorted by each column. Selecting one of the networks in the list will show the corresponding line in the graphs thicker which is a nice touch and very helpful to follow the network in the diagrams. Both graphs can be easily copied and pasted as an image via the Edit menu. The only cosmetic change I would like to see is a better support of resizing the column width which didn’t work so well for me. n addition, by showing all wireless networks within range, and showing on which channels they broadcast, you can look for network conflicts. For example, you may find out that on the top floor of your house, a neighbor’s wireless network is broadcasting on the same channel as yours–and that its strength is even stronger than yours, causing no end of problems. Based on that, you can change the channel that your router uses for transmission.
