AirMagnet AirMedic

RF and WiFi Troubleshooting Made Easy

AirMedic is a new type of network tool that brings AirMagnet troubleshooting to the rest of us. Built upon AirMagnet's unmatched experience in WiFi troubleshooting, AirMedic is a fast and simple, "just the facts" approach to dealing with the periodic performance and reliability problems that all wireless LANs experience. AirMedic does this by bringing together the two most essential perspectives of WLAN performance, combining lab-quality spectrum analysis and basic WiFi traffic analysis into one simple view.

In wireless, not all problems are the same — some are due to RF interference from non-WiFi devices such as Bluetooth, while other problems are solely rooted in the WiFi realm such as overloaded devices or configurations leading to low data speeds. Only AirMedic gives you the ability to see both sides of the equation so that you know precisely where things are going wrong. With AirMedic you can see RF interference, and know immediately the real impact it is having on end-users in the network. If the problem is not due to RF interference, you can see which channels and devices are having problems and why.

In addition to this game-changing approach to performance troubleshooting, AirMedic brings unprecedented flexibility to your wireless toolkit. Unlike other WiFi spectrum analyzers that require expensive, single use dedicated spectrum cards or adapters, AirMedic leverages Intel Centrino 2 processor technology built-in to modern Intel laptops. This first of its kind integration means that there are no expensive external cards that can get lost or broken and that your troubleshooting tools have the same RF perspective on the environment that an actual end-user would see, meaning better response times and better accuracy.

Full RF Analysis with Multiple Configurable Spectrum Views

The core of the AirMedic solution is a lab-quality spectrum analyzer that lets you look into the physical layer of your wireless LANs to identify interference and problems in the RF environment. However, unlike traditional spectrum analyzers, AirMedic does not require you to be an RF expert in order to solve problems. Instead AirMedic offers multiple spectrum views to ensure that you see the information you need to identify and resolve any problem. Including:

• Spectrum FFT for real-time RF analysis
• Spectrum Density to see patterns that reveal signals that are hard to see in real-time
• Spectrogram provides a rolling RF history for seeing intermittent RF bursts

WiFi Made Easy with Diagnostic Views and Charts

AirMedic boils the network down to its most core components and delivers them in a single integrated view. A single mouse click provides instant access to any of the 14 available RF and WiFi (optional) charts, ensuring that you can always find the information that you need. Built in "Easy Views" provide some of the most popular charts for troubleshooting particular problems, or users can save their own customized views tailored to their troubleshooting methodology. AirMedic also makes it easy to capture information for reporting with simple copy-and-paste support for all charts and graphs in the solution.

Solve Real WiFi Problems

Simply plug in any AirMagnet supported wireless adapter, and AirMedic instantly provides performance analysis for all WiFi devices and channels in the vicinity. Channel utilization charts let you know if one of your channels is being overloaded in terms of traffic and devices. Speed charts provide insight into efficiency problems in the network. Charts of packet retry and error rates easily reveal areas where WiFi communications are failing. AirMedic also provides a full inventory of the WiFi devices in the environment including APs, end-user stations and even WiFi phones.

See Impact of WiFi Devices on Your Spectrum Plots

AirMedic provides an inventory of all WiFi devices in the environment and lets you visualize the impact of that device in the spectrum. Simply click an AP, SSID or channel and AirMedic provides color-coded outlines of the selected devices on the spectrum density graph. This makes it easy to determine if a particular RF signal is from a WiFi device or a non-WiFi source.

2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Unique Visibility

AirMedic provides clear visibility into both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi bands and delivers the pinpoint resolution necessary to find and resolve interference and RF problems. Users can choose to view bands individually or leverage "mixed mode" for complete coverage of all WiFi bands.

AirMedic also provides unique visibility by providing views broken into lower, mid and upper sections of the 5 GHz spectrum. This ensures you always see the same level of resolution and detail regardless of the portion of the spectrum, and that you see all of your RF environment no matter if you use 802.11a,b, g or n.

Simple One-Screen Interface

AirMedic's simple interface keeps everything at your fingertips without searching between multiple pages. All information can be seen in a single view alongside spectrum information, meaning the relationship between spectrum and real performance is always clear and ensuring that you have full visibility into both WiFi and RF-based problems.

Microsoft Gadgets

Microsoft Gadgets are light-weight single-purpose applications that can sit on the user's computer desktop, or are hosted on a web page. According to Microsoft, it will be possible for the different types of gadgets to run on different environments without modification, but this is currently not the case.

Contents

• 1 Etymology
• 2 Types of Microsoft's gadgets
• 3 Web Gadgets and Live.com
• 4 Desktop gadgets
• 5 Device Gadgets and Windows Sideshow
• 6 See also
• 7 External links
• 8 References

Etymology

In the context of software engineering, the term gadget was first employed by the developers of AmigaOS, the operating system of the Amiga computers in 1985.^{[citation needed]} As of 2008, this naming convention is sometimes used as a synonym for widget—a control element in a graphical user interface.

It is not known whether other software companies are explicitly drawing on that inspiration when featuring the word in names of their technologies or simply referring to the generic meaning. The word widget is older in this context.

Types of Microsoft's gadgets

1. Web gadgets - run on a web site, such as Live.com or Spaces.Live.com
2. Sidebar gadgets - run on the desktop or be docked onto, run on the Windows Sidebar.
3. SideShow gadgets - run on auxiliary external displays, such as on the outside of a laptop or even on an LCD panel in a keyboard, and potentially mobile phones and other devices.

Desktop gadgets

Desktop gadgets are desktop widgets; small specialized applications that are generally designed to do simple tasks, such as clocks, calendars, RSS notifiers or search tools. They can also be used to control external applications such as Windows Media Center.

A panel, or sidebar, is found on either the right side (default) or the left side of the Windows desktop in the Windows Vista operating system. Gadgets can be placed on this sidebar, and they are automatically aligned on it. Gadgets can also be placed elsewhere on the screen, which generally causes them to expand and display more information. In Windows 7, the sidebar is removed, although gadgets can somewhat similarly be aligned on any side of the screen. Gadgets are toggled between the two sizes via a button in Windows 7.

Device Gadgets and Windows Sideshow

SideShow gadgets is Microsoft's implementation of Widgets which run on auxiliary external displays, such as on the outside of a laptop or even on an LCD panel in a keyboard, and potentially mobile phones and other devices.

Windows SideShow is a new technology that lets Windows Vista drive auxiliary, small displays of various form-factors where ready-access to bite-size bits of information could be represented. These include displays embedded on the outside of a laptop lid or on a detachable device, enabling access to information and media even when the main system is in a standby mode. Data can also be displayed on cell phones and other network-connected devices via Bluetooth and other connectivity options.

The display can be updated with a number of different kinds of information, such as contacts, maps, calendar, and email. This can then be consulted while the mobile PC is otherwise powered down. Since the underlying platform is so power-efficient, it can run for hundreds of hours without draining a notebook battery, while still providing always-on access to data and multimedia content.

Sideshow is coupled to the Windows Vista Sidebar capability – that is, Sidebar Gadgets are easily ported to be compatible with Sideshow secondary display applications. However, hardware and silicon providers can also provide native capabilities to allow for richer multimedia applications such as text, image, audio and video decode / playback. For example, a notebook with an in-lid display could be used as an mp3 player while powered down, with the notebook battery providing hundreds of hours of playback time because of the low power footprint that the Sideshow platform maintains.