Show HN: htop for the airwaves — a live 802.11 RF dashboard in your terminal
Airtop is a new terminal-based dashboard that visualizes live 802.11 Wi-Fi traffic. It provides insights into nearby access points, signal strength, and frame activity without requiring monitor mode or raw sockets. This tool is particularly useful for home users and network administrators to diagnose Wi-Fi issues and optimize channel selection.
- ▪Airtop creates a live dashboard of Wi-Fi traffic using eBPF to read 802.11 frames.
- ▪It displays information such as signal strength, discovered networks, and frame types in a terminal interface.
- ▪The tool is designed for users to troubleshoot Wi-Fi issues and analyze their RF environment.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
airtop htop for the airwaves — a live 802.11 (Wi-Fi) RF dashboard in your terminal. airtop turns the Wi-Fi traffic around you into a live terminal dashboard — a frequency spectrum of nearby access points, per-station signal traces, a frame-type activity feed, an RSSI histogram, and a rolling list of discovered networks — drawn with braille and block graphics over eBPF. TipNo monitor mode, no raw sockets. airtop attaches eBPF programs to mac80211/cfg80211 and reads 802.11 frames as they flow through the kernel's Wi-Fi stack, so it runs on your normal, connected interface without dropping your link.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.