Awesome

Introduction

This is a simple spectrum visualizer and dumper based on the ath9k spectral scan feature. If you have a Qualcomm/Atheros Wifi device on Linux, and have built the driver with debugfs support, you can use this program to see the RF spectrum in something resembling real-time.

Prerequisites

• one or more Wifi devices that supports the spectral scan feature (only ath9k and ath9k_htc drivers tested at this point)
• above drivers compiled with debugfs enabled
• the iw utility installed

Usage

On Ubuntu, run:

$ sudo python speccy.py wlan0 wlan1 ...

where wlanN are the devices you'd like to use. Up to four devices are supported.

Key bindings

• 'l' - Toggle line graph
• 'f' - Cycle through frequency bands
• 's' - Toggle scatter plot
• '1', '2', '3', '4' - Switch control to device number n. Default is 1
• 'c' - Switch scanner to 'chanscan' mode [default]. Hardware tunes to all WiFi channels and deliver a certain number of samples per channel. Default is 8
  • 'Arrow key Up' - Double the number of samples (up to 255)
  • 'Arrow key Down' - Divide the number of samples by two (down to 1)
• 'b' - Switch scanner to 'background' mode. Hardware will deliver as much samples as possible
  • 'Arrow key Left' - Tune one channel up (only in 'background' mode)
  • 'Arrow key Right' - Tune one channel up (only in 'background' mode)
  • 'Arrow key Up' - Increase the number of samples hold for visualization
  • 'Arrow key Down' - Decrease the number of samples hold for visualization
• 'm' - Toggle between HT20 [default] and HT40 mode
• 'd' - Toggle dumping binary data with timestamp in a file
• 'u' - Toggle UI processing
• 'q' - Quit the program