Ekahau Mobile Survey Delivers Promising WiFi Survey Tool to Android Phones and Tablets

by Andrew Garcia

I could set Android to show the Mobile Survey Widget on the home screen, showing detected signal strength, data rate and connected AP for actively surveyed networks. I could also start and stop background monitoring from the widget.

The passive survey results in all detected WiFi networks, while an active scan also uses information about the connected network to make guesses as to which networks are potential rogues.

Active survey results are compared against a baseline template organized toward the particular network’s design objectives. Users can see by the color code if one criteria fails to meet the baseline.

Mobile Survey comes with five default Requirement Profiles, which are used to define the baselines.

Each Requirement Profile is user-editable, allowing WiFi administrators to better detect violations as defined in network or application policy.

Users can set Mobile Survey to ping the default gateway or another manually defined host to ensure connectivity to the network during a scan.

I could access the details page by swiping up from the bottom of the Test screen. Details shows relevant information about networks, addresses and signal strength.

Although Mobile Survey includes a floor map viewer, this feature only works with survey plans and floorplans exported from Ekahau’s pricier Site Survey software for PCs.