WirelessNetView is an incredibly useful free network monitoring software. Almost unbelievably feather light yet packing quite a punch, WirelessNetView automatically scans the available wireless networks around you and monitors their activity. It can then return a wealth of information regarding the detected networks in a single and convenient interface. For each of the monitored wireless networks, WirelessNetView can display details such as SSID, MAC Address, RSSI (received signal strength indication), authentication algorithm used, and a whole lot more. You can even export all this information easily in the form of a HTML report. And if that wasn’t enough, WirelessNetView is available as a standalone portable application.
How To Use This Free Network Monitoring Software?
As I mentioned prior in the article, WirelessNetView is available as a portable lightweight application (though there’s a regular installable version as well). But at just 50 KB in size, it seems to set a whole new benchmark at being lightweight. Yeah you read that right, this thing is just 50 KB in size. Download the zipped application from its homepage, extract it and run it. Here’s how WirelessNetView looks like:
As you might’ve guessed, WirelessNetView sports as minimal of a user interface as possible. It’s simple, intuitive, and has nothing that shouldn’t be there. The single window user interface essentially just consists of a listing of all the scanned wireless networks and information about their relevant parameters. Apart from that, there’s just a simple menu/options bar. Super simple stuff!
Using WirelessNetView is so absurdly easy, I’m not even sure what to write about it. There are no extra settings to configure, no drop-down menus to choose from, nothing. All you have to do to “use” WirelessNetView is just launch it, and it’ll take it from there. Once launched, the application automatically scans all of the available Wireless Networks, and displays a whole lot of information about their important parameters in individual columns. Frankly, there’s just too much information that WirelessNetView throws at you. Some of the important wireless network statistics that you can view are SSID, Authentication Algorithm Used, Encryption Standard, MAC Address and RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication). If you want more, just keep scrolling to the right!
Exporting Information As HTML Report
One of the nifty features of WirelessNetView is its ability to export the returned network information in the form of an HTML Report. Doing so is extremely simple. All you have to do is go to View > HTML Report and it’ll automatically fire up a nicely formatted HTML report in your default browser, from where you can save it. Here’s how it looks like:
Also See: Netgear Genie: Free Network Monitoring Software
Conclusion
WirelessNetView is a nifty and powerful free network monitoring software. It’s incredibly lightweight and easy to use as well. Features like automatic scanning of available wireless networks, myriad array of network details, and HTML report generation make it quite a solid application.
