NetSpot: powerful wireless survey tool for home and office

15% discount for NetSpot Pro – find the coupon code after the article!

Wi-Fi is now a mainstay in our daily working lives and also for surfing the net at home, whether you’re using a phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, handheld games console, or some other enabled gadget. That’s why it’s essential to have a steady, reliable signal for transferring your data.

And this is where NetSpot, a free-of-charge Mac tool from Etwok, comes in handy. It enables you to scan your local area for all Wi-Fi signals and study relevant information including open and closed signals, or dead zones. Most significantly, NetSpot features a drawing utility that allows you to map a Wi-Fi friendly floor plan in your home or office, so that you can organise your router and electronics in such a manner that you’re always able to benefit from a powerful throughput. In just a couple of mouse clicks, you can  assemble all the juicy data you could ever need for  radio signal leakages analysis, noise sources discovery, access points identification, and more.

After you tap the so-called ‘Stop Scan’ button, NetSpot creates a colour-spectrum ‘heat map’ with the indigo end of the spectrum indicating the most weak signal-to-noise ratio, or SNR (which is the measure of how much data can be transferred, an approximate measure of throughput), and the red balance shows the strongest. This might be perplexing to some, since users would typically assume that green is the strongest, yellow is average, and red is the weakest. However, a scale at the foot of the completed map helps you to interpret the reading correctly, so this isn’t too much of an issue.

It’s possible to highlight as many spots as you desire, for your analysis –and the more you select, the more impressive your results, particularly in a suburban house or office arrangement that suffers from ‘dead areas’ as a consequence of poorly planned network layout, thick walls, robust furniture, or any of the wide range of consumer or business appliances that sometimes interfere with Wi-Fi signals.

NetSpot is offered in several editions: FREE, PRO and Enterprise.

The standard version of NetSpot 2.0 is free and includes the top requested features like wireless discover mode, the ability to delete any sample point during a scan, the ability to re-locate access points and a new streamlined interface. All users that need more advanced Wi-Fi survey features can upgrade to the PRO or Enterprise version. The PRO edition offers network experts even more advanced features, including multi-floor scanning, active scanning, the ability to scan hidden networks, and automated troubleshooting. The Enterprise edition includes all the features of the PRO edition and provides licenses to all users within a company, along with priority support.

To get your 15% discount on NetSpot Pro, use coupon code: TCHPT-15

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