WifiNigel

*** Note this article is out of date. Please use the information on this page until I get this artcile updated:  https://github.com/WLAN-Pi/WLANPiShark2 *** One huge advantage that Apple Mac users have over owners of Windows 10 machines is the ability to perform a native 802.11 wireless packet capture direct from their built-in wireless NIC. This is extremely useful for wireless pros who want to take a quick over-the air-capture into Wireshark to analyze traffic for troubleshooting purposes. Windows users don’t have the luxury of this native wireless capture capability. In this article, we take a look at how we can use a WLANPi unit as an adapter to capture traffic over the air, straight into Wireshark on a Windows machine. With the WLANPi being powered from the USB of the laptop, this is a super convenient, portable and powerful capture method that gets Windows users a little closer to the capabilities of their cousins on Apple Macs. Background I’ve always felt really bad...

I recently read a very nice article by Matt Frederick about using a Windows command prompt utility to gain information about what your Windows wireless adapter is up to while connected to a Wi-Fi network ( https://finesine.com/2016/09/17/using-netsh-wlan-show-interfaces-to-monitor-associationroaming/) In  Matt’s article, he described how he wrapped the ‘netsh’ command into a nice little batch file to run the command regularly, allowing information to be presented in a more dynamic fashion. I was so impressed with the information provided by the utility, that I decided I’d  try to get the information it provides into a more usable format. In short, I hacked together a Windows Powersell script that runs the ‘netsh’ CLI utility regularly and parses the output data into a CSV format. By piping the output into a file, you can get a nice CSV file that can be opened in Excel to look at the raw data over a period of time. It’s great for looking at the adapter signal level a...

This probably falls into that category: " stuff that everyone else already knows, but I don't ", but I thought it was worth jotting down a few notes about. I recently saw someone tweet about the command: " netsh show wlan <various options> ", which I had never heard of before. After having had a look through the command help screens, it seems an incredibly useful command if you want to quickly find out about the wireless networks and the wireless capabilities of a Windows 7 machine you're working on. Much of the information can be found by poking around in various GUI pages, but this command line utility is much quicker to use and gives a greater depth of information. I'll just run through a few useful examples and then leave you to poke about in the help pages yourself if you want to know more. A great way to get a summary of the wireless networks that a Win 7 client can hear is to open a command window (...or a DOS box as I like to call i...