Using Wireless Diagnostics Utilities in MacOS
I met one partner this week and he has asked me for the suggestion of Wi-Fi Analyzer tools for MacBook. In fact, MacOS has the built in Wireless Diagnostics tools that we can use for Wi-Fi Scanning and Packet Capture.
See below for the instructions and steps we can follow to open the Wireless Diagnostics tools in your MacOS.
First, press Command + Space and we type “Wireless Diagnostics” to bring up the window:
Wireless Diagnostics includes below additional utilities from the menu bar including Assistant, Info, Logs, Scan, Performance and Sniffer. Let’s take a look at how these tools can be useful for Wi-Fi Analysis.
Info: Gathers key details about your current network connections.
Rate shows the transmit rate over time in megabits per second.
Signal shows both signal (RSSI) and noise measurements over time. RSSI, or “Received Signal Strength Indicator,” is a measurement of how well your device can hear a signal from an access point or router. It’s a value that is useful for determining if you have enough signal to get a good wireless connection.
Ref: Wi-Fi signal strength basic from MetaGeek
https://www.metageek.com/training/resources/wifi-signal-strength-basics.html
Quality shows the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over time.
SNR = Signal Strength – Noise Floor
A higher SNR value means that the signal strength is stronger in relation to the noise levels, which allows higher data rates and fewer re-transmissions.
Sniffer: Captures traffic on your Wi-Fi connection, which can be useful when diagnosing a reproducible issue.
We can select the channel and channel width that we would like to do the packet capture, and click “Start”.
Once you finished the packet capture, we can click Stop “Stop” and a PCAP file will be automatically created and store in /var/tmp.
Reference:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202663