Wi-Fi networks have quickly gained popularity in the past few years for accessing the publicly available Internet. For using public Internet through you Wi-Fi, you need a computer equipped with a Wi-Fi adapter. If you have more than one Wi-Fi networks available in your area, then you should connect to the one with better signal strength. You can search for Wi-Fi networks and view their signal strengths using the free software called Homedale Wi-Fi/WLAN Monitor.
You can download the Homedale Wi-Fi/WLAN Monitor from the SZ Development website. The download is a portable application packed inside a ZIP archive. You can just download and extract the application from the ZIP file and run homedale.exe from there. It works in all the versions of Windows starting from Windows XP to Windows 8. When you run it, it starts to scan all the available Wi-Fi networks available in your area.
All the networks are shown with access points, MAC address, vendor name, signal strength, encryption used, country ID, frequency and other information. The access points to which your computer is currently connected are shown with a blue colored icon while the unconnected access points with green colored icons. If you want to connect to an access point, then you can right-click on it and select Connect. You should note that some of the access points require usernames and passwords in order to connect to them.
If you want to investigate how the signal strength of the access points goes up and down with time, then you can use the signal graph of the Homedale Wi-Fi Monitor. The signals of the different access points are showing in different colors. This way you can study the signal strengths of the networks at a particular time and connect to the one with higher signal strength during that time of the day.
You can download the Homedale Wi-Fi/WLAN Monitor software at https://www.the-sz.com/products/homedale/.