I’m a big DragonForce fan, and I thought these guys sounded similar, and it turns out that a lot of their members came from DragonForce. PowerQuest: It’s middle-of-the-road fantasy/melodic heavy metal. So now, with my tools collected, I’m off to do some drawing. If you care at all about measuring (and who doesn’t, really?), you need one of these: It was also hidden in one of my kids’ toy boxes since they like the numbers and the colors. Now, a rational person might just grab a tool off the web and use that to do a floorplan, but that’s not how I roll: I’m a pencil and paper type of guy, so I’ll do a set of drawings. Thus, we will divert briefly into a quick digression on drawing floorplans. Given my love of making plans, it’s a shock that I don’t have any others I can find. Much to my dismay, this old plan was the only one I had of any of the four floors of my house. I’ll show those more when I do the full survey. I was able, in just a few minutes, to get a baseline, with little or no effort. To begin, just point to where you are on the map and NetSpot starts measuring wireless signal right away. You need just a few clicks to load your office plan or area map before starting a network site survey. I can’t really do justice to just how awesome this tool is, though. NetSpot is the easiest native wireless site survey software for Mac and Windows. Note also that you can see a thick wall about 1/3 up the page – that’s the original back wall of the house, made of brick. The survey shows the overall SNR (Signal To Noise) of my 5G network, which is broadcast by 3 APs (Access Points), one in the attic above, one on the main floor, below, and one on that floor in the yellow spot in the lower left corner. I feel that since my experience with my WiFi is not so good, the fact that these are in the middle of the range is about what I expect. I don’t really know if this is good or bad, yet. It turned out like this: Second Floor Signal To Noise Then, I did my survey by walking around the second floor and sampling the WiFi. I kept defaults, and did not opt to do an active scan (which would measure upload and download speeds). Then you can add networks to scan, and finally set up active scanning. From there, it can gauge the size of the map. Then I used their clever tool where you draw an arbitrary line on the map and indicate what that true length is. I was finally able to locate one that was not scribbled on, took a pic with my phone, and loaded it. I gave it a try, but It would have taken me a while to do, and so I scoured my office for a floorplan of one of the floors of the house. My first thought was to draw a map with the ‘draw it’ option. You can see that it can do some heavy-duty stuff here. I chose ‘Closed office space or apartment’ when I started: Zone Setup When you start a survey, you add a zone, which, in my case, would be a floor. I played with it for a bit, then decided to give a survey a try. I have to say, this is really nice software. I downloaded it, bought my license, and was on my way. My first task, using Lee Hutchinson’s guidance, was to buy a license to NetSpot so I could do a Site Survey and see what my WiFi was doing. The next step in my project is to survey my current WiFi to see what is happening there.
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