Vista - WiFi Signal Strength Gadgets
Don Bradbury searches for the best Vista Gadget accurately and clearly showing WiFi signal strength; any additions to this basic requirement were considered a potential bonus.
While Vista's Network and Sharing Center will show you whether you've established a successful connection to the Internet, and the Notification Area connection pop-up will give you a simple five-band guide to WiFi signal strength at the access point, many will consider these inadequate and want a rather more precise - and maybe more informative - indicator, perhaps for those occasions when they want to position the connected device optimally, or tune their network adapter.
We searched the Vista Sidebar Gadgets web site** to find something suitable and selected half a dozen that looked promising. Installed Vista Gadgets are small, although you can, if you chose, detach any of them onto the Desktop for better viewing, provided you don't mind the intrusion onto your work space. We popped them all onto their own Sidebar and show them in action in the graphic below, complete with some of our own preferences for colour scheme, signal strength indication and so on.
Our primary requirements were for something easily readable, informative in terms of displaying more precisely than a basic five range bar chart, and perhaps also something to remind us of the security settings on the router(s) from which we were currently receiving signals.
For the required precision, although there were alternatives on offer from the likes of Xirrus, the signal strength readout would probably be shown in percentage terms, with zero strength taking the user into 'you're going to lose it' territory. So bar charts, radiation bars, or any other sort of graphic signal strength indicator were OK provided we also saw the more precise percentage indicator clearly.
As far as the first point was concerned, that of clarity, we realised that for a small Vista Gadget to be informative it might be compromised by the percentage signal strength readout being too small to see comfortably. For example, compare the first (Xirrus) Gadget below with the others to see what we mean. However, as you'll see, there can be many useful compensations with this arrangement, depending on personal priorities.
For Geeks
To suit the latter category for the Geeks among us, we included the Xirrus WiFi Monitor. There's no limit to the additional information you that can be provided concerning WiFi connections, of course, but for a Sidebar Gadget most of it would have to be on pop-outs. Well that's not intrusive, but it means a bigger, more powerful Gadget and therefore it would consume rather more resources.
From the security aspect, a simple lock graphic might satisfy our criteria, or the word 'locked', but that shouldn't be an intrusive overlay, as in our fourth example. Preferably, we'd have access to the actual security setting we'd established on our router, as we said.
From the top of the graphic then, we have the Xirrus WiFi Monitor v1.11. Our second example is called simply Wireless Meter, with this you could enter a new device IP address on a pop-out, or you could click on a transparent button in the top left corner, when you hover the mouse pointer over it, to get another pop-out and see the quality of the connection, your IP address, and the DNS address.
The third example is the Wireless Monitor, which offered no options but had the advantage of indicating a secure connection directly on the gadget. Our fourth possibility is the Wirewolf Gadget from Lorne L Reap, offering no options. Fifth from the top is the iStat Wireless v1.2 by Pavel Kuzub. This gives the option to check external IP but shows no security settings.
Our sixth and final offering is called appropriately, Wireless Network. Here, besides the simple readout of signal and SSID (router from which the signal is currently being taken) you could additionally energise a transparent bar near the top of the Gadget by hovering the mouse and then see your current connection status, the SSID, the signal strength together with the quality of signal, whether the connection was secure (though not the mode), and the local machine IP address. There's a final option, 'Configure this device', taking you to the site of your DNS server.
Variations on a theme
The Xirrus WiFi Monitor, by default, often showed a totally different signal strength to the rest. Sometimes it was wildly different. That's because the default setting showed the maximum signal strength from the SSID that the WiFi adapter was currently scanning. If you wanted the more generally accepted type of signal strength readout you could switch to 'classic' mode in the 'RSSI Method' option of Settings. Xirrus point out that they regarded their 'accurate' setting as a more appropriate indicator for those who are interested in the maximum signal strength available in the locality. Be that as it may, we think most people will want to know the strength of the signal they are actually using.
Xirrus also offer the alternative dBm method of showing signal strength. On the percentage scale, a 100% signal strength (-50dBm) does not indicate the maximum possible that's available. Using the dBm scale you might see, for example, -20dBm recorded and that would indicate 160% signal strength on this arcane scale of 100% = -50dBm to 0% = -100dBm. We feel it will not be of importance to most people.
For the confused, we should quickly add that if you want to know 'everything' about your connection, this is undoubtedly the Gadget to go for, among those we tried.
Judgement Day
Any of these Vista Gadgets could satisfy the inquisitive WiFi user, but some are prettier than others and easier to read, while some are more informative. The Xirrus WiFi Monitor by default gave signal strength readouts that frequently didn't agree with the other five, for the reasons described, but you can change that. The other five Gadgets all moved precisely in concert if we adjusted the signal strength at our remote laptop by adjusting the router aerials or relocating the receiving computer, for example - as did the Xirrus WiFi Monitor after we'd set it to 'classic' mode.
For an excellent signal strength indication, we thought the sixth example, the Wireless Network, had the advantage of being very easy to see the most relevant facts, plus you could easily access the other useful details we mentioned.
Our second option was rather less basic and showed it's lock graphic, while in the case of our third option we noted that it could, somewhat unnecessarily in view of the % indicator, split it's five bar indicator into fractional bars, plus the lock symbol was a little superfluous when we already had the 'secure' label.
Chose one of these by all means for your basic indication of signal strength, but techies will possibly go for the Xirrus WiFi Monitor, probably switching the RSSI Method to 'classic' mode, and then note all the wealth of additional information this Gadget brings, including the actual authentication mode and encryption employed at the router, the network mode and its type and so on, plus the Statistics and Glossary pages which are well worth a browse. We show below the Available Networks page obtained by clicking the 'show details' tag, together with parts of the Statistics and Glossary pages.
The downside of the Xirrus WiFi Monitor, if there is one, is that the basic signal strength readout is small in comparison with that offered by the other Gadgets. If that's all you're interested in, then you might chose from among the rest.
**Specific Gadgets are none too easy to locate on the Gadgets website, but if you right click on a blank part of the Vista Sidebar, select 'Add Gadgets', then 'Get more gadgets online', then 'See all gadgets', and then make sure you select 'Tools and Utilities' to home in on your type preference. From there, it's a case of ploughing through the pages until you see the Gadget you want to try. Download it, install it, and position it where you need it in your Sidebar array.
