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Home / News / Drop everything and download: Architecture of Radio

Drop everything and download: Architecture of Radio

Meet the app that lets you see radio waves and Wi-Fi signals

Architecture of Radio, despite its name, is not an app which has diagrams and drawings of the dissected radio innards. Though there probably is an app for that. Instead, it grants you with the most sought-after of all superhero powers – the ability to see radio waves.

Okay, so maybe you’d rather shoot lasers out of your eyes, but we don’t have the technology for that, so for now, this will have to do.

Rather than actually detect all of those RF waves washing over you in real time (because we don’t have the technology for that either), it instead builds up a rather pretty visualisation of satellite locations, routers and mobile phone towers, and shows how waves can interact between them all.

The app uses GPS along with a global database that contains the locations of seven million mobile phone towers and 19 million routers, in addition to the hundreds of satellites in orbit. It’s a pretty comprehensive way to see just how much you’re being bombarded with signals at any given time or place.

It won’t let you measure signal strength or network speeds of course, but if you’ve recently contemplated wearing a tinfoil hat, then this could very well be just the app for you.

Architecture of Radio is currently available for the iPad on the App Store for £2.29, and an Android version is in the works, with an estimated early 2016 release date.

[via VR Focus]

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Esat has been a gadget fan ever since his tiny four-year-old brain was captivated by a sound-activated dancing sunflower. From there it was a natural progression to a Sega Mega Drive, a brief obsession with hedgehogs, and a love for all things tech. After 7 years as a writer and deputy editor for Stuff, Esat ventured out into the corporate world, spending three years as Editor of Microsoft's European News Centre. Now a freelance writer, his appetite for shiny gadgets has no bounds. Oh, and like all good human beings, he's very fond of cats.