Gadgetory

this is one of the coolest gadgets I've played around with in a long time it's an expensive program solution but if you or a client is having an impossible issue with a wireless network it could absolutely save your bacon oh and I'll cover some more practical stuff for home users as well welcome to how to optimize your Wi-Fi I guess the flash voyager GTX USB 3 drive from Corsair provides SSD like performance and fits comfortably in your pocket click now to learn more now in a perfect fantasy world only two Wi-Fi devices would be in one place at one time an access point and a single client that would work awesome unfortunately in the real world that's not really how it goes down and you'll have sometimes dozens of devices chattering at the same time now Wi-Fi devices are designed to be very polite and not talk over each other so as long as they're all on the same channel every device will wait it's turn to communicate which means there's a finite amount of communication that can be done per channel once you reach that limit you're pretty much done there are a couple of solutions though solution number one is to change the operating channel of your wireless equipment but that needs to be done with care if you weren't in considerate neighbor chooses overlapping channels that complicates communication because instead of every device waiting it's turn to communicate they'll all just kind of try to yell on top of each other so choose non-overlapping channels the problem is that in the 2.4 gigahertz band there are only three non-overlapping channels so that's still a very finite amount of communication that can be done which leads to solution number two reduce other wireless signals this can be done by asking very close neighbors to kindly turn down their antenna strength by turning off unnecessary Wi-Fi hotspots and by wiring up as many devices as you can so not every piece of electronic gear in your house is competing for airtime this kind of tweaking is actually pretty easy to do with either meta gates in SSID or for tool or an Android app like Wi-Fi analyzer but one of these solutions emotions what if these solutions don't work it's possible there's a non Wi-Fi device interfering with your network switching to newer dual-band five gigahertz wireless equipment is one solution that will probably work because while ranges are slightly reduced there are many more available channels and much less equipment that uses them but in an office environment where you can't control what people are using or even in the home it's not always an option so this is the Y spy dbx from Metta geek this professional-grade device combined with the Wi-Fi card in your PC and Metta geeks channel Iser software is a powerful spectrum analysis tool that lets you visualize the 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz wireless activity around you including both Wi-Fi networks and non Wi-Fi compliant interferes the device itself is pretty straightforward included in the Box is this little black box and antenna a USB to cable and a little clip that you can use to attach it to your PC like so this is the way I'd recommend using it since diagnosing interferers is often going to be a pretty active process with a lot of running around let's get into the software so first we'll take a look at both density and waterfall view which show real-time and historical wireless activity and they both use the x-axis to show which channel the signal is being transmitted on but you still use them a little bit differently so density view shows us the amplitude of the activity on the y-axis so how loud a device is talking and uses color coding from blue to red to indicate how often it's talking this red blip right here is transmitting all the time but it's not very loud while the one here only transmits around 10% of the time but is so loud that it's either very powerful or very close by waterfall view works more like a seismograph where the amplitude of the signal is color-coded now and how often it happens is represented by how often the dots appear in a vertical line so back to our previous examples that red spot now has a constant blue color code and we see lots and lots and lots of activity in that line while the tall blue peak has less frequent but red our coded activity one more trick here is that we can use the navigation feature on the left is kind of a PVR to see anything from a short recent 30-second snapshot for on-the-fly diagnoses of issues to hours of recorded activity to get a really clear idea of what's going on in that area throughout the day just don't forget to create sessions so you know where you were and what you were trying to monitor at the time all right so enough theory I promise this was a cool gadget let's play with it shall we here's the 2.4 gigahertz frequency range around the office lots of SS IDs we can see them broadcasting with that faint blue halo some of them are strong others aren't none of them have particularly intense activity going on for now one thing you might notice if we overlay the Wi-Fi networks though is that the configuration here is a total mess one of ours is on channel 2 and seems to have Auto configured itself to 40 megahertz a performance boost in theory but with so much other traffic going on around here it's probably not helping anyone and there are a couple of other nearby networks on overlapping channels too yeah but that stuff's easy we don't need a fancy tool for that so let's take a look at what different kinds of traffic look like it's kind of cool so this is what low bitrate buffered video playback on a mobile phone looks like when we have our spectrum analyzer these short bursts mean that we're nowhere near saturating our connection this on the other hand is what high bitrate 1080p playback looks like not nearly as many gaps between data transmission in order to build the buffer might have a hard time running multiple streams of this at the same time and then ha big leagues now NVIDIA game stream this is why they have a recommended list of high quality routers to stream games over your Wi-Fi network there is no buffer time in between transmission because low latency is key so data needs to be moving constantly and without any interruptions but all this is stuff that's relatively easy to diagnose because it's Wi-Fi here what about the real reason we got this tool non Wi-Fi stuff whoo whoa there what's that out of nowhere we've got a device hopping around thankfully outside of our Wi-Fi channels whose red color indicates at least 50 percent air time use this one in this case it's a g930 headphone from logitech wireless headphones this one is well-behaved but many devices like baby monitors will accidentally jump on top of your Wi-Fi from time to time causing interruptions now you know switching over to five gigahertz the first things that jump out are how little background interference there is and how many more channels are available if I had capable gear I could actually spread right out and run a couple of 40 megahertz or even 80 megahertz quadruple wide channel access points for massive throughput sure we right there's not much to see here otherwise but just for fun let's have a look at what it looks like if I run iperf on my phone to simulate heavy network activity and then truck myself downstairs where the access point is the intensity of the activity doesn't change in the density of you but you can see the amplitude increases dramatically so this hot and cold style of discovery based on the strength of the signal can actually be used in some really interesting ways let's pop back over to 2.4 gigahertz for a second what the heck are these two blue spikes here that don't look like Wi-Fi they don't have a Wi-Fi shape the software lets us find out by using the inspector feature to highlight them and basically run around with the laptop looking for the signal strength to increase or decrease turns out it was a 2.4 gigahertz RC airplane radio it's things like this and other non Wi-Fi 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz stuff that can be infuriating to diagnose without a tool like this but if at this point you're sitting there thinking ok line is so I spend $1000 on a piece of hardware and software license so that I can yell at the neighbor kid for flying is dub plane are you dumb no the why spy the less expensive 2.4 gigahertz only model and the Wi-Fi dbx are for pros who set up like Wi-Fi networks for a living for normal people there's the stuff I mentioned before or Wi-Fi helper which is a wizard-based $10 tool that walks you through optimizing your network probably better bet unless you've got like I don't know microwave next to your computer that's constantly running that's what it looks like by the way no wonder you can't stream video while you're cooking your Hot Pocket am i right anyway guys thanks for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment with suggestions for future videos 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