 This is one of the coolest gadgets I've played around with in a long time. It's an expensive, pro-grade solution, but if you or a client is having an impossible issue with a wireless network, it could absolutely save your bacon. Oh, and I'll cover some more practical stuff for home users as well. Welcome to how to optimize your Wi-Fi, I guess. 🎵 The Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 drive from Corsair provides SSD-like performance and fits comfortably in your pocket. Click now to learn more. Now in a perfect fantasy world, only two Wi-Fi devices would be in one place at one time. An access point and a single client. That would work awesome. Unfortunately, in the real world, that's not really how it goes down, and you'll have sometimes dozens of devices chattering at the same time. Now, Wi-Fi devices are designed to be very polite and not talk over each other. So as long as they're all on the same channel, every device will wait its turn to communicate, which means there's a finite amount of communication that can be done per channel. Once you reach that limit, you're pretty much done. There are a couple of solutions, though. Solution number one is to change the operating channel of your wireless equipment, but that needs to be done with care. If you or an inconsiderate neighbor chooses overlapping channels, that complicates communication, because instead of every device waiting its turn to communicate, they'll all just kind of try to yell on top of each other. So choose non-overlapping channels. The problem is that in the 2.4 GHz band, there are only three non-overlapping channels. So that's still a very finite amount of communication that can be done. Which leads to solution number two. Reduce other wireless signals. This can be done by asking very close neighbors to kindly turn down their antenna strength, by turning off unnecessary Wi-Fi hotspots, and by wiring up as many devices as you can, so not every piece of electronic gear in your house is competing for airtime. This kind of tweaking is actually pretty easy to do with either Metageek's in-SSID-er 4 tool, or an Android app like Wi-Fi Analyzer. But what if these solutions don't work? It's possible there's a non-Wi-Fi device interfering with your network, switching to newer dual-band 5 GHz wireless equipment is one solution that will probably work, because while ranges are slightly reduced, there are many more available channels, and much less equipment that uses them, but in an office environment where you can't control what people are using, or even in the home, it's not always an option. So this is the YSPYDBX from Metageek. This professional-grade device combined with the Wi-Fi card in your PC and Metageek's channelizer software is a powerful spectrum analysis tool that lets you visualize the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz wireless activity around you, including both Wi-Fi networks and non-Wi-Fi compliant interferers. The device itself is pretty straightforward. Included in the box is this little black box, an antenna, a USB 2 cable, and a little clip that you can use to attach it to your PC like so. This is the way I'd recommend using it, since diagnosing interferers is often going to be a pretty active process with a lot of running around. Let's get into the software. So first we'll take a look at both density and waterfall view, which show real-time and historical wireless activity. And they both use the X-axis to show which channel the signal is being transmitted on, but you still use them a little bit differently. So density view shows us the amplitude of the activity on the Y-axis, so how loud a device is talking, and uses color coding from blue to red to indicate how often it's talking. This red lip right here is transmitting all the time, but it's not very loud, while the one here only transmits around 10% of the time, but is so loud that it's either very powerful or very close by. Waterfall view works more like a seismograph, where the amplitude of the signal is color-coded now, and how often it happens is represented by how often the dots appear in a vertical line. So back to our previous examples, that red spot now has a constant blue color code, and we see lots and lots and lots of activity in that line, while the tall blue peak has less frequent, but red color-coded activity. One more trick here is that we can use the navigation feature on the left as kind of a PVR to see anything from a short recent 30-second snapshot for on-the-fly diagnosis of issues, to hours of recorded activity to get a really clear idea of what's going on in that area throughout the day. Just don't forget to create sessions so you know where you were and what you were trying to monitor at the time. Alright, so enough theory. I promise this was a cool gadget. Let's play with it, shall we? Here's the 2.4 GHz frequency range around the office. Lots of SSIDs. We can see them broadcasting with that faint blue halo. Some of them are strong, others aren't. None of them have particularly intense activity going on for now. One thing you might notice, if we overlay the Wi-Fi networks though, is that the configuration here is a total mess. One of ours is on channel 2 and seems to have auto-configured itself to 40 MHz, a performance boost in theory, but with so much other traffic going on around here, it's probably not helping anyone, and there are a couple of other nearby networks on overlapping channels too. But that stuff's easy. We don't need a fancy tool for that, so let's take a look at what different kinds of traffic look like. This is kind of cool. So this is what low bitrate buffered video playback on a mobile phone looks like when we have our spectrum analyzer. These short bursts mean that we're nowhere near saturating our connection. This, on the other hand, is what high bitrate 1080p playback looks like. Not nearly as many gaps between data transmission in order to build the buffer. Might have a hard time running multiple streams of this at the same time. And then, haha, big leagues now, Nvidia Game Stream. This is why they have a recommended list of high-quality routers to stream games over your Wi-Fi network. There is no buffer time in between transmission because low latency is key, so data needs to be moving constantly and without any interruptions. But all of this is stuff that's relatively easy to diagnose because it's Wi-Fi gear. What about the real reason we got this tool? Non-Wi-Fi stuff. Whoa there, what's that? Out of nowhere, we've got a device hopping around, thankfully outside of our Wi-Fi channels, whose red color indicates at least 50% airtime use. This one, in this case, is a G930 headphone from Logitech, wireless headphones. This one is well-behaved, but many devices like baby monitors will accidentally jump on top of your Wi-Fi from time to time, causing interruptions. Now you know. Switching over to 5 GHz, the first things that jump out are how little background interference there is, and how many more channels are available. If I had capable gear, I could actually spread right out and run a couple of 40 MHz or even 80 MHz quadruple-wide channel access points for massive throughput. Sweet, right? There's not much to see here otherwise, but just for fun, let's have a look at what it looks like if I run iPerf on my phone to simulate heavy network activity, and then truck myself downstairs where the access point is. The intensity of the activity doesn't change in the density view, but you can see the amplitude increases dramatically. So this hot and cold style of discovery based on the strength of the signal can actually be used in some really interesting ways. Let's pop back over to 2.4 GHz for a second. What the heck are these two blue spikes here that don't look like Wi-Fi? They don't have a Wi-Fi shape. The software lets us find out by using the inspector feature to highlight them and basically run around with the laptop looking for the signal strength to increase or decrease. Turns out it was a 2.4 GHz RC airplane radio. It's things like this and other non-Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz stuff that can be infuriating to diagnose without a tool like this. But if at this point you're sitting there thinking, okay Linus, so I spend a thousand dollars on a piece of hardware and software license so that I can yell at the neighbor kid for flying his dumb plane, are you dumb? No. The Y-Spy, the less expensive 2.4 GHz only model and the Y-Spy DBX are for pros who set up like Wi-Fi networks for a living. For normal people, there's the stuff I mentioned before or Wi-Fi helper, which is a wizard based $10 tool that walks you through optimizing your network. Probably a better bet unless you've got like, I don't know, a microwave next to your computer that's constantly running. That's what it looks like by the way. No wonder you can't stream video while you're cooking your hot pocket. Am I right? Anyway guys, thanks for watching. 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