Analyze your Wireless Signal Strength and more with this In-built, Secret Mac tool!

by Karthik K on January 2, 2012 in Apple

Analyze your Wireless Signal Strength and more with this built-in tool that comes with the Mac OS X Lion. This tool can help you improve your WiFi performance by tweaking some settings!

Apple‘s Mac OS X Lion shipped with a whole lot of features and interestingly, some of the tools that Apple has built for testing are also hidden inside the System. One such tool is the WiFi Diagnostics tool. The tool is well designed, which aligns with the Steve’s Principle. The WiFi Diagnostics tool helps you get detailed reports about the Signal Strength, the number of packets sent and received, Analyze each packet that are getting transferred from the Mac and more.

The tool is Apple branded and this tool can help you improve the WiFi network performance by allowing you to make some cool adjustments as you use the tool. And for some reason, the tool has been hidden inside the CoreServices folder and is not visible for the end-user. But nevertheless, you can always access the Library folder, which is hidden by default on your OS X Lion, with this tutorial I posted earlier. Once you get access to your Library folder, you can make a few clicks to reach the WiFi Diagnostics tool.

So, lets now get into the tool and try some tweaks that would probably improve your WiFi Performance.

Navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/ folder.
Check for WiFi Diagnostics app and open it!

Now that you are in the app, you will now see this screen, where it allows you to Choose between some options of the tool. Now, let’s just Monitor our Wireless signal strength and performance. All we have to do is just select Monitor wireless performance and click Continue.

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Now in the next screen, the app shows a comparison chart that shows the live statistics of your Wireless Network. The Yellow line is the WiFi Signal and the Green one is the Noise of your WiFi network. The lower the Noise, the better is your performance of your WiFi network. Noise is the disturbance in the WiFi connection that should be reduced to make the max out of the WiFi Router.

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Noise can be reduced by changing your WiFi router’s antenna or move the router away from electrical disturbances, etc. Once you are done capturing some statistics about your WiFi router and network, you are good to go with two other important options. One is to save the Diagnostics information to your HDD and the other is to send it via email. This information would help you compare the difference between your performances after you change some parameters of your router.

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There might be vast differences between WiFi networks, since the Noise is not constant everywhere. Find a best place to place your router, so that the device is away from external noises that interfere with other frequencies. Did you run this diagnostics? What difference did you find? Share some tips in the comments!

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