These days a WiFi network is the most popular method of connecting to the internet. The main reason for favoring a wireless connection over a cabled connection is obviously the portability and ease of operation. There are no cables and no cable related problems. This is why if we try to connect to a WiFi, we see hundreds of WiFi networks available in any area.
All these wireless local area networks (WLAN) operate on slightly different frequency ranges called channels. For the 2.4 GHz band based WiFi networks, there are 14 such channels available. For example, channel 1 operates on a frequency range between 2401 MHz to 2423 MHz, while channel 5 works on a range of 2421 MHz to 2443 MHz. Similarly, the 5 GHz and 6 GHz WiFi bands also have many different channels.
If your computer’s WiFi adapter is configured to have to work with the channel that the WiFi network is operating on, then you can much more stable and smoother connection. The opposite is also true – if your PC’s WiFi adapter does not support a channel, then it will fail to detect the WiFi network operating on that channel.
We can use a freeware called WifiInfoView to find the channels used by all the WiFi networks around us. For this, we must have a WiFi network adapter which is something all the computers have these days. As we launch WifiInfoView, it scans all the available WiFi networks around us and shows all the details about them.
In the windows of WifiInfoView, we can see the SSID (WiFi network name), the MAC address, PHY coverage (802.11 protocols supported), signal quality in terms of percentage and the channel in use. Depending on whether your network adapter is configured to work at 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, the channel number is going to be different for all the networks detected by WifiInfoView.
So this is how easy it is to find the channels in use by any WiFi network in your surroundings. WifiInfoView can show much more information about your WiFi networks as well.
You can download WifiInfoView from https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wifi_information_view.html.