Ambit: Network & Wi-Fi Tools

Most network scanners tell you an address and a manufacturer. Ambit tells you what the device

actually is.

The difference is method. A scanner that recognises hardware addresses can only ever return

what the manufacturer registered — "Espressif Inc.", "Texas Instruments", the company that

made the chip rather than the thing on your shelf. Ambit interrogates each device instead: it

asks over mDNS, UPnP, NetBIOS, ONVIF, SNMP, SSH, HTTP and a dozen vendor protocols, and reads

what the device says about itself. That is how a smart plug comes back as a smart plug and a

camera comes back with its model number.

And every identification can be opened. Tap a device and you see the evidence — which protocol

answered, what it said, and how much weight that carries. Nothing is a black box you have to

take on faith.

WHAT IS ON YOUR NETWORK

• Every device found, with make, model, type and open ports

• Full identification of a single device on demand, including the unusual ports a sweep skips

• A per-network list, so a different Wi-Fi does not show you yesterday's house

• Alerts when something new appears, with the history kept per network

• Custom names and notes that follow a device across address changes

• Export to CSV, JSON or PDF

WI-FI

• Every network around you, with channel, width, band and security

• Channel occupancy drawn at true width across 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz

• A best-channel recommendation based on what your neighbours are actually using

• Signal over time, with a live meter for the network you are on

• Open, WEP and WPS warnings, and evil-twin detection

NEARBY

• Bluetooth Classic and Low Energy, with proximity and manufacturer

• Compare two scans taken at different times to see what was present at both — the honest way

to check whether something is following you, because you choose the moments

• NFC tag reading and writing

• The phone's own sensors: acceleration, gravity, magnetic field and air pressure

SATELLITES

• GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, QZSS and SBAS, listed whether or not any are overhead

• Sky plot with signal strength, and which satellites are actually in the fix

• Position, accuracy, altitude against both sea level and the ellipsoid, speed, heading

• Fix time in local time and UTC

• Time to first fix, and whether your phone is dual-frequency

INTERNET

• Speed, and latency measured while the line is busy — the figure a speed test hides

• DNS resolver benchmark

• What the internet can already see of your connection

A COMPUTER CAN SEE MORE

Android hides the address table from apps, which is why a phone alone recovers a hardware

address for only a handful of devices. Ambit Companion is a free program for Windows, macOS

and Linux that scans from a computer and hands the result to your phone over your own network

— paired by scanning a code, with nothing sent anywhere else. On the network this was built

against it took identification from 21 devices to 39.

PRIVACY

Ambit works entirely offline. There is no account and nothing is stored on a server. Two

features reach the internet and both are off until you turn them on: looking up a stubborn

device in a cloud database, and checking what is publicly visible of your connection. The

databases the app identifies with are downloaded, not uploaded to.