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GCN Home > 06/23/08 issue

Wi-Fi Detective uncovers hidden world

GCN Lab review: The Wi-Fi Detective from StarTech.com puts an end to the laptop-balancing act. You just turn it on, stick it in your pocket, go for a walk and detect accessible Wi-Fi signals

By Trudy Walsh

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Searching for an accessible Wi-Fi signal can be awkward. You have to walk around with your laptop PC turned on and flipped open, balancing it with one hand and clicking with the other to find signals. You feel a little like a waiter carrying a big platter, trying not to trip and fall.

But what if you had a small, portable device about the size of a cigarette lighter that could alert you to available Wi-Fi networks? The Wi-Fi Detective from StarTech.com puts an end to the laptop-balancing act. You just turn it on, stick it in your pocket and go for a walk.

It has an LCD screen that shows the names of Wi-Fi networks in the vicinity and the type of network — displaying a “b” for 802.11b and “g” for 802.11g. A lock icon indicates whether the network is open or secured. It also shows if a connection uses the Wired Equivalent Privacy encryption protocol and indicates the strength of the signal by the number of bars. Five is a strong signal; two is weak.

Image: GCN
All this appears on a screen smaller than your thumb. The screen is my one complaint about the Wi-Fi Detective. It packs a lot of information, but it’s a bit dim, especially for viewing in bright sunlight.

For $75, though, it opens the whole world where Wi-Fi lurks.

Remember the war-chalking days, when people chalked symbols in public spaces to show where Wi-Fi was available? Well, you can donate your chalk to the local elementary school. Wi-Fi Detective is your personal electronic warchalking assistant.

The device has a lithium-polymer battery that you can recharge with a USB connection. After a brief initial charge, it works for at least three hours.

I started my Wi-Fi detection expedition from my cubicle at the GCN editorial offices in suburban Virginia. A switch turns the unit on, and buttons on the sides let you scroll through the available Wi-Fi signals. The process is pretty intuitive.

I knew that at best I could only get faint Wi-Fi signals in my cubicle, and sure enough, the one open Wi-Fi signal was weak.

I went home to my apartment in Bethesda, Md. Bethesda is to me what Dublin was to James Joyce, who once said he wanted to paint such a complete picture of Dublin in “Ulysses” “that if the city suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book.” The same way Joyce memorized the look of every cobblestone in the Irish city, I’ve memorized the color of every Bethesda sports bar awning, the burnt-garlic smell of its overpriced restaurants and the sounds of pub-crawlers yelling at 2 a.m. every weekend. It’s all indelibly etched into my heart.

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