Author Archives: Ryan

The Evolution of the Geeks

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Ryan

February 2010: MetaGeek moved into a new office, twice the size of our previous space.  We had a large conference room for staff meetings, a small conference room for calls, a big reception area, and plenty of space for our employees. Plus, it had an extra garage/warehouse section that added an additional 1500 sq ft. We figured we’d be able to stay put for at least three years.… Read More

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What Happened to My Duty Cycle?

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Ryan

Duty Cycle… We’ve struggled with this term at MetaGeek for a couple years now. It seemed like every other spectrum analyzer calculates duty cycle, so we debated whether we should calculate duty cycle too. But what exactly is the “duty cycle” of a frequency? Duty Cycle is traditionally calculated for a specific signal and is defined as the pulse duration divided by the pulse period, as shown in this animated gif from Wikipedia:

Wi-Spy, like all spectrum analyzers, measures raw RF power coming from any number of signals all mixed together, with signals at varying amplitudes and durations.… Read More

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Sharkfest

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Ryan

Trent and I spent most of this week hanging with the great folks and uber geeks at Sharkfest; If you use Wireshark for packet analysis, you really should look into attending Sharkfest. This was my third year at Sharkfest and it’s becoming a geek reunion of sorts… a great place to learn about wireless troubleshooting and share ideas.
Our presentation was titled Visualizing RF (generic title so we could change the content last minute if we wanted to), and was focused on how RF interference affects the packets in Wireshark and what it looks like at the physical level, along with some tips for filtering various Wi-Fi packets in Wireshark.… Read More

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MetaGeek Presents at Gestalt IT Wireless Tech Field Day

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Ryan

A couple of weeks back MetaGeek had the pleasure of being a sponsor at the first wireless-specific Tech Field Day put on by Gestalt IT. The concept behind the event is simple: have the innovative IT companies in the wireless space give an in-depth technical presentation and demo to about a dozen independent IT bloggers and journalist types (the delegates). This gives the companies a chance to really show off their products, and to get awesome feedback from people that aren’t afraid to ask the difficult questions.… Read More

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20% Time at MetaGeek

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Ryan

Last August we started a 20% Time program similar to Google, 3M and Westinghouse*. Everyone at MetaGeek can take up to one day a week to work on projects of their own creation… and I mean everyone, not just engineering. Marketing, finance, shipping… full-time, part-time, interns… everyone.
It’s been awesome! This picture shows some of the projects that people have worked on: everything from bi-weekly company barbecues to CWNP certifications, experimental hardware, inSSIDer for Linux, YouTube videos, and new ways to visualize Wi-Spy data.… Read More

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How Wi-Spy Works

Posted on January 28, 2011 by Ryan

Wi-Spy’s approach to spectrum analysis is a bit different than other spectrum analyzers. Regular spectrum analyzers like Agilent and Tektronix contain Super Heterodyne Receivers to measure an entire RF band at whatever arbitrary resolution you’d like. This is extremely powerful… and expensive. The Airmagnet Spectrum XT uses a Wi-Fi radio to measure a 20 MHz band at twice the resolution of the channel subcarriers (156.3 KHz).… Read More

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Wi-Spy: Five Years of Leading the Way

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Ryan

This month marks the five year anniversary of Wi-Spy and Chanalyzer. A few days ago I was looking back at screenshots of Chanalyzer 1.0 (a.k.a. Wi-Spy Viewer) and laughed at how basic it was. The data resolution was so bad the screenshots look like they are from an Atari console game But even that very first version of our software contained some significant innovations in PC-based spectrum analysis that have since been adopted industry-wide.… Read More

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Mega Bloks + Dry Erase Marker = Flexible Roadmap

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Ryan

MetaGeek follows a lot of the Agile principles; we like to keep things simple and flexible, and like true geeks everywhere we love Legos… so why not use Legos for a roadmap?
Here’s our current roadmap (bricks are flipped around to hide the labels)

Color = Development Group
Blue is Software, Red is Firmware, Green is Hardware.
Length = R&D Effort
The length of each block represents the R&D effort involved and is somewhat analogous to a chunk of story points in SCRUM.… Read More

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Chanalyzer Pro: Sparklines

Posted on April 26, 2010 by Ryan

We’ve been working for the past few months on some really nifty innovations for Chanalyzer Pro and I thought I’d share some of these concepts with you to get your feedback. The first concept is pretty simple… we’ve added sparklines to the Wi-Fi table. This makes it easier to see at a glance if a network’s signal strength is consistent or is bouncing up and down.… Read More

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Migrating forum to vBulletin

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Ryan

The forum has become popular enough that we’ve decided it’s time to look at a dedicated forum platform. MetaGeek.net uses the Drupal platform and the forum is currently just a Drupal forum, which is adequate, but lacks many of the features of serious forum platforms. After investigating the popular forum platforms out there we have settled on vBulletin.
The migration will be occurring over the next week and should be fairly smooth; we’ve tested it out and have over 95% of all posts converting, but image attachments will have to be migrated manually after the initial migration has been completed.… Read More

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