A WLAN scanner is a piece of software which will allow you to scour the airwaves for wireless networks. Sometimes the network card in your desktop or laptop fails to pick up anything other than saved and configured networks, but by analyzing what is going on in the air around you, it should make hooking up to a wireless network a much easier task. By detecting the signals in the air, you can choose one channel in particular to monitor. Think of a scanner which scans radio channels and it will be a close comparison. There can be an abundance of network channels in the same airspace, and so seeing what is available can help set up your connectivity. Having downloaded a WLAN scanner, the software will run and start to monitor what is available. When it listens, the software will cycle through all of the channels available to it, and when completed the full course, will loop and start back at the first channel. This is so that the airways are continuously being scanned without pause. If you want to monitor traffic on a certain channel you should be able to configure the software to detect the amount of