cool-radar

Nearby radios, measured and inferred — never faked. Every number says how it was obtained.

cool-radar turns the radios already inside your iPhone into a radar for the devices around you — with no extra hardware, and without inventing a single number.

WHAT YOU SEE Nearby Bluetooth LE devices appear as contacts with an estimated distance, a bearing once there is enough geometry to support one, and a ranked guess at what each device actually is. The Wi-Fi card shows the link your phone is really on: type, interface, local address and subnet, the default gateway and the gateway's manufacturer. Where both ends have UWB hardware, distance stops being an estimate and becomes a measurement.

HONEST BY DESIGN Every value carries a badge. "Measured" is a hardware reading. "Inferred" is a value the math derived. Distances read "≈ 4.5 m" because radio ranging is an estimate, not a ruler. When there is not enough geometry for a direction, the app draws a ring of possible positions and a question mark instead of a convincing-looking arrow. And when iOS simply does not expose something — neighbouring Wi-Fi networks, raw spectrum, Wi-Fi CSI — the app says so instead of filling the gap with fiction.

THE MATH INSIDE • Log-distance path-loss inversion, with a per-device exponent that recalibrates itself from the geometry you walk • Kalman filtering with motion-gated noise, so a device that is standing still stops drifting on screen • Robust multilateration with Huber weights, so a single reflection off a wall cannot drag a position across the room • A naive-Bayes hypothesis engine that ranks device types from the broadcast name, company ID, advertised GATT services, transmit power, address policy and advertising cadence — and shows you the evidence behind every guess • Behaviour analytics over the signal time series: advertising interval, jitter, trend and periodicity • Radio tomography that maps excess path loss into an attenuation picture of the space

FEATURES • Top-down radar with range rings, pinch to zoom, double tap to reset • Device list with search and type filters • Device card with signal history, ranked hypotheses and the evidence for each • Unwanted-tracker heuristics based on public advertising patterns • CSV export of a session • Full Russian and English, switchable inside the app

PRIVACY All sensing and all math run on your iPhone. No account, no analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifier. One optional setting — off until you turn it on — may send a 24-bit manufacturer prefix to a public vendor database to name your router. Nothing else ever leaves the device.

Use cool-radar only on networks and devices you are entitled to inspect. It does not decrypt Find My identities, does not enumerate neighbouring Wi-Fi networks, and provides no covert tracking of people.

REQUIREMENTS iOS 18 or later. Bluetooth works on every iPhone. UWB distance needs U1/U2 hardware on both devices. Room geometry needs a LiDAR model. Anything unavailable on your hardware is shown as unavailable rather than simulated.