Take the 2-minute tour ×

I need to analyze the channel my wifi card is operating on. I have found a program called Chanalyzer Pro, offered by metageek. However, it is not really worth it for me to buy the software if I will only use it one time. Does anyone know of any freeware alternatives, preferably for Linux?


share|improve this question

2 Answers 2

If you have an Android device, grab Wifi Analyzer - its free and really good for showing whats going on with WIFI - and portable too.

Most Linux WIFI connection programs should show you usefull "dumbed down" information, but you can see exactly what the signal strengths are by (from a terminal) typing

iwlist WLANDEV scanning  | less

This will show you all the broadcasting ESSID's and quality, signal strength, noise level, security, mode, supported bit rates, Mac addresses - only its not very pretty.

share|improve this answer
up vote 1 down vote accepted

While iwlist does show signal level, it does not show noise and other information which the spectrum analysis tool shows. I have discovered a program called Horst which is a simple channel analyzer, not as detailed as the commercial ones, but it does its job.

Apparently, Kismet also has this capability through plug-ins. I will have to try that a bit later, when I get the time.

share|improve this answer
IWLIST does show the noise level for me, on the same line as the signal and quality. A quick and dirty command "iwlist eth1 scanning | egrep "ESSID|Noise" shows this. Horste does look pretty cool though - it seems to merge the output from ISLIST (or equivalent) and TCPDUMP (or equivalent) –  davidgo Feb 1 '13 at 20:17
@davidgo $ iwlist wlan1 scanning | egrep "ESSID|Noise" only shows the name of the ESSID for me –  b-vigilanT Feb 2 '13 at 18:50

Your Answer


