Ever suddenly experience degraded wireless network performance for no apparent reason? I certainly have.
Most people know that microwaves, cordless phones and baby monitors can interfere with your home wireless network's performance and cause your connection speed to slow down or you to lose your connection alltogether. I for one have a nasty habit of leaving the baby monitor right by my laptop - duh!
Well, now there is a new small gadget to help you diagnose wireless interference problems. It's called the Wi-Spy and it is a customized USB key that you plug into a USB port on your computer. 
The Wi-Spy then proceeds to analyze the 2.4 GHz frequency band in real-time and provide you with all kinds of charts and graphs. You can even record what is going on and play it back later.
Wi-Spy provides some telltale example patterns of what the signal will look like if you are experiencing a microwave interfering with your wireless network for example. This reminds me a lot of the handheld ultrasound my wife rented when she was pregnant with our son. We listened for our son's heartbeat, but there were all kinds of swishing sounds going on - hard to tell what they were! Thankfully the company provided a CD of what a typical heartbeat sounded like, and what some of the other sounds were that we were hearing.
Here's a screen shot of the Wi-Spy in action:
This is a pretty geeky device - I think most people can just try to keep cordless phones and other wireless devices away from their laptops, wireless routers and computers and they will be fine - but, for the more serious home networking aficionados, and for home network installers, this seems like a great tool.
The Wi-Spy retails for $99 - very inexpensive for what it does. You can buy it directly from the manufacturer, MetaGeek (what a great name).
