Ekahau HeatMapper Wireless free mapping tool

Jeff Liebermann · 2009-04-20T03:55:35+00:00

Ekahau HeatMapper Wireless free mapping tool:Great fun. Scribble a map of your home or office with any paintprogram. Walk around the room while left clicking the mouse to markyour position on the map and record the signal strength. Right clickto stop recording. Results look something like:I ignored the instructions that claimed it only works with XP andVista (32 bit) and installed it on a W2K desktop. No problems (sofar).

J

Jeff Liebermann 17 years ago

That's possible, but I doubt it.

How large? I ran another test, but didn't bother posting the results. Instead of walking around the loop near my house, I walked down the road in front of my house (about 100 meters) and back. That reduced the number of AP's heard from 24 to 8. Same problem.

I get roughly the same thing when I do it indoors.

Yes. The color is almost always orange. I wasn't paying attention to the signal strength values shown.

That would work. If not, there are other screen grab utilities that can do the job. However, it would be nice if the internal screen grab button had a keyboard shortcut.

I'll play with this some more around the office and with a virgin XP or Vista laptop. I'm beginning to think it might be a side effect of the large number of shims for network monitoring utilities I have installed in my laptops.

Vote

L

LR 17 years ago

4 of the houses I can get to all four sides so I did 2 readings per side. Where I could only get to the front and back I did 3 readings per side. If I could only get to one side of the house I did 3 readings again and I also took a reading further away from the house to get some sense of direction of the AP. I also took some random measurements further away from the other houses for the same reason.

Vote

L

LR 17 years ago

While we had some fine weather I re-installed the s'ware and did a quick check around the neighbourhood but this time I created the map from a .gif file instead of using the grid. This time using the "map" option I got a similar colour scheme to your files and the whole map was in a single colour but all the AP's, that I was able to get to front and rear, were in the correct position. There is evidently a difference between using the "Map" and "Grid" option.

Vote

L

LR 17 years ago

I have just been on a longer walk using the grid option and the AP's that were located correctly have in the majority moved to the edge of the grid along with 48 other AP's, which has left just my router and 2 other AP's in the correct position. Because there are so many AP's listed some are actually overlapping each other, which is very annoying. However when you check the signal map for each AP you still get a varying colour scheme, dependent on the signal strength, unlike the single colour that was shown when using a map.

Vote

J

Jeff Liebermann 17 years ago

I've mostly confirmed your observations. I installed Ekahau HeatMapper on three laptops and one desktop. All of these started to exhibit some rather weird behavior. Two would work with any AP that it had previously (prior to installing HeatMapper) successfully connected, but not to any new AP's. It would fail with a DHCP failure. No amount of ipconfig release/renew would help. The others had similar problems, but oddly, would fail to connect at different points. I was too lazy to enable and dump the wireless log files for details. Worse, I didn't notice for about a week, and have done considerable add/remove/tweak on these computers.

I uninstalled HeatMapper, rebooted, and found that you're correct. It leaves behind "Ekahau NDIS User Mode I/O Protocol". It appears that it's a different driver for W2K/XP and Vista (NDIS5 versus NDIS6). I uninstalled this protocol, rebooted, and some (not all) of the connection problems were magically fixed. The problem is that all of the laptops and the desktop still have problems connecting to various AP's scattered around the house and neighborhood. In addition, browsing now has a rather long 2 second delay when looking for something in the DNS cache. My guess(tm) is that there's either more debris left behind by the install, or that HeatMapper overscribbled one of the network drivers. I tried System Restore on one of the laptops, but that didn't help. If I find a cause and/or fix, I'll post it.

I kinda regret ever mentioning this free program, as it doesn't quite do what it claims (broken algorithm?), and the install is at least partially broken and possibly destructive.

Vote