WiFi Sonar: Signal Strength

One room is always worse than the others. Sonar tells you which one, and by how much.

Stand where the Wi-Fi feels slow and press measure. Sonar reads the radio, times how quickly your router answers, and turns the wait into a single score out of 100. Do that in a few places and you have a survey: your rooms in order, worst first, with every number behind each one.

WHAT YOU GET

• A live signal meter in dBm, with the band (2.4, 5 or 6 GHz) and the channel you are on
• A score out of 100 for each spot, built from the signal, how steady it is, the speed of the link to the router, and how quickly the router replies
• Measure for ten seconds or a full minute: a quick sweep of a flat, or a long look at the chair that keeps dropping
• Your spots ranked and compared, grouped into places: home, the office, anywhere else
• A plain answer for each spot: is the Wi-Fi here enough for video calls, HD video, 4K, gaming
• A proper A4 PDF report to send to a landlord, an internet provider or a colleague, with no watermark and no limit on how many readings go in it, or the raw readings as CSV
• A channel graph of the networks around you, so you can see who is sitting on your frequencies
• Made for phones and tablets, in light and dark: on a tablet, the list and a reading sit side by side

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT

• No permission prompt to use it. The meter, the survey, the score and the report all work with every permission switched off. Granting location is optional, and only adds network names and the list of nearby networks.
• No ads. No interstitials, no rewarded videos, no consent wall.
• No account and no sign-up.
• Nothing leaves your device. There is no analytics, no tracking and no server. The only way a measurement goes anywhere is a report you share yourself.
• Nothing is capped. Measure as many spots as you like and put all of them in the report.

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO

Sonar measures the link between your device and your router. It does not test your internet speed, and it cannot tell you whether the line into your building is fast, slow or down. If your broadband is the problem, a strong Wi-Fi score will not save you, and Sonar will not pretend otherwise. It does not change any setting on your router, and it will not make your Wi-Fi faster by itself. It tells you where the problem is, so you can fix it.

HOW THE SCORE WORKS

Four things: the signal strength in dBm, how much it moved while being measured, the speed the two radios agreed on, and how quickly the router answered. Out of 100, and higher is better. Every figure that went into it is shown next to it, so you can check the score against the measurements rather than trust it.

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone whose calls drop in the back bedroom and who wants to know whether to move the router, add a mesh point, or take it up with their provider. Also useful as a Wi-Fi analyzer if that is what you came for: signal strength meter, channel and band, link rate, round-trip time to the gateway, and the networks in range with their channel widths.

Free. No ads. Nothing uploaded.