SmallNetBuilder

Setting Up

On the first launch, you are presented with a quick three screen tutorial. Figure 3 shows the first screen of the tutorial. There's very little documentation, so I recommend that you also take about nine minutes to watch the product tour video on the Fluke Networks site.

Figure 3: Start of three screen tutorial

In order to perform a site survey, you must have a floor plan. Since I don't work in an office building and don't have access to an office floor or a floor plan, I decided to test AirMapper using two other scenarios. First, I decided to take a wireless survey of my neighborhood. Using Google Earth, I zoomed into my street and grabbed a screen shot.

For my second test, I used the floor plan for the first floor of my condo. As you'll see in subsequent shots, my neighborhood is very densely populated with Wi-Fi networks.

Starting a new project is a three step process:

• Give the project a name
• Input a floor plan. You can either import an image file or use the built-in camera in your Android device to take a photo.
• Input the dimensions of your floor plan, or use the calibrate feature to input a known distance on your floor plan.

Figure 4 shows the project setup screen for my neighborhood site survey.

Figure 4: Project setup screen

Figure 5 shows using the calibration feature. You just drag the targets to a known or measured distance, and then you input that distance. For my neighborhood image, it was easy - I just used the scale provided by Google Earth, and stretched the calibration targets onto the scale. I then input 157 - the length of the scale. For my condo floor plan, I measured the length of my dining room, and aligned the targets to the area I measured.

Figure 5: Calibrating using targets

When you click "Done", you're ready to start your survey by pressing the green "Start Survey" arrow shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Starting the survey