Built-in Wi-Fi scanner in Mac OS X

After having another wireless network stomp all over mine, it was time to look for a less crowded channel. With Snow Leopard a lot of the third-party scanner tools don’t seem to work.

Apparently, Apple modified the Airport Extreme drivers and removed the API. However, for a simple scan, the one built into Mac OS X is sufficient.

To perform a scan, use the ‘-s’ option. A GUI wrapper can be found here.

$ /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -s

Advertisement