Is there an HDSDR program for your wifi?

[Beamin]

Is there a program that is like HDSDR that uses your onboard wifi? To look at each channel and see what's going on. Seems like this would have come out along time ago but all I can find are programs for external SDR.

[james_s]

You'd have to have a wifi chip capable of outputting raw samples, which I doubt any of them will do. The breakthrough that enabled cheap SDR was when someone figured out one of the common TV tuner ICs could be configured to spit out raw samples. WiFi chipsets typically implement several layers in hardware/firmware and are not usable as general purpose radio transceivers.

[Richard Crowley]

What do you mean by "whats going on"?
Do you mean which channels have RF levels?
Do you mean identify individual senders and receivers?
Do you mean peek at the packets to see which are going where?
Do you mean peek inside the packets to spy on the content?

There are scores (perhaps hundreds) of apps for my Android phone that will show WiFi RF activity in terms of signal strength on each of the 13 channels.  And likely more info than that.

And likewise there are many apps for Windows that will show a remarkable amount of information about local WiFi activity.  I have "Acrylic WiFi".  For both the mobile smart-phone apps, and the Windows apps there are free versions that show much useful info, but then there are paid versions which will show much more for a modest price.

Dunno anything about IOS or Mac.  I hate Apple with a passion.  But perhaps there are similar apps?

[Berni]

Yeah what do you expect to see from it? These wifi apps can show you a lot of stuff.

My more small office grade Mikrotik router has a so called "wifi snooping" mode where it will not only show all the networks around but also the clients connected to them along with how much traffic each one is causing on the network.



Of course that is as much info as one would hope to gain from it since any actual data going across the network is encrypted (Hopefuly is it at least, and with a modern not yet broken standard)

Still this is more than enough information to determine the best frequency band to operate your wifi router on

EDIT: Oh and the reason why those RTL-SDR spit out raw IQ data is simply to save cost on making them. By not having to decode any of it means that they don't need a fast and powerful CPU in there and its easier to stay within the power draw limits for USB ports. Instead they cheat and the dongle simply streams the raw data to the PC where it uses its vastly more powerful PCs CPU to actually decode it into video. WiFi uses much higher bandwiths so this would be impractical, they instead have more purpose designed RF trasciever chips in there where the whole MAC layer is handled (as its normal for a network card)

[9aplus]

You may try metageek.com inSSIDer lite
last version expects free registration
older working without....