Reading the Airwaves: A Live WiFi Radar for Cathedral
A list of nearby networks tells you what is around you. It does not tell you where those networks sit, how strong each one is, or which of them deserve a second look. For that, your eyes want a picture — and the picture security films have promised for decades is a radar quietly sweeping the airwaves.
At Crowned Phoenix, we have always believed that a tool should feel as serious as the work you do with it. So when we set out to upgrade Cathedral's WiFi scanner, we did not want a prettier table. We wanted the radar. The difference is that ours is built on real measured radio, not a looping animation.
From a Table to a Radar
Run wifi in Cathedral and the console still prints exactly what it always has: a clean, scriptable table of every access point, sorted by signal, with band, channel, security and vendor. That output is canonical and it is not going anywhere — if you are piping results into another tool, nothing changed.
What did change is the visual panel beside it. It is now a polar radar scope, and every access point is plotted with intent:
- Distance from the centre is signal strength. The strongest networks sit on the inner rings; the faint, far-away ones drift out toward the edge.
- Angle is channel. The 2.4 GHz band fans across the upper half of the scope, 5 GHz across the lower, so the spectrum has a fixed, readable geography
- Colour is security posture. Open networks glow amber as a warning; WPA2 sits in standard phosphor green; WPA3 stands apart in a brighter cyan-green.
- Hidden networks appear as ghost rings — visible, located, but unnamed.
A phosphor beam sweeps the scope, new networks announce themselves with a soft expanding pulse, and when several access points share a channel, they fan out into a small cluster instead of stacking into an unreadable blob. It is the "hacker scanning the airwaves" beat from every heist film — running on signal your own hardware actually measured.
Real Radio, Not Theatre
The detail we care about most is the honest one. Radio is noisy: the signal strength of a given network can jitter by several decibels from one reading to the next. A radar that twitched with every sample would look broken, not alive. So each network's position is smoothed over time, which keeps the plot stable while still letting it move when something genuinely moves.
Under the surface, this is the same engineering philosophy that runs through all of Cathedral. A small, dependency-free Go program does the scanning and emits its results as a stream of structured events. The Flutter front end reads that stream and draws the scope. There is no heavyweight runtime, no phone-home, no cloud — just a static binary and a canvas, working entirely offline. Whether your adapter reports precise decibels or a simpler signal percentage, the radar adapts and labels its rings honestly so you always know what you are looking at.
Room to Breathe
A radar is wonderful until you have eighteen networks crowded into a side panel. So we gave every visual a way to step forward.
Click the maximize icon in any visual panel — or press Ctrl+Shift+M — and the view lifts into the centre of the screen at full size, framed in the same phosphor styling. Press Escape, click away, or hit minimize to send it back. Because Cathedral's visuals are resolution-independent by design, this was not a feature we built for the radar alone: it works for the network map, the trace globe, the location view — every visual surface inherits it for free. The dense centre of the radar that was tight in the corner becomes genuinely readable when it fills the room.
Detail on Demand
The final touch is the smallest and, in practice, one of the most used. Hover the cursor over any point on the radar and it lights up, and a compact card appears beside it: the network's name, its BSSID, its hardware vendor, and its band, channel and signal at a glance.
It means the strongest few networks no longer need to be the only labelled ones. Every dot on the scope — including the quiet ones at the edge — is now something you can interrogate with a flick of the mouse. Inspection became a gesture instead of a lookup.
Built to Last, and to Generalize
None of these three improvements is really about WiFi. The radar is a reusable drawing surface, the maximize modal lifts *any* visual, and hover inspection is a pattern we will carry forward. As Cathedral grows toward richer passive-sensing work, these are the foundations the next surfaces will stand on — which is exactly how we like to build: each feature a keystone for the next.
The console stays canonical. The visuals get serious. And the airwaves, for the first time, are something you can simply look at.
Cathedral is built in Tallinn, Estonia, and developed in the open. Explore the code and the growing Cookbook on our GitHub, follow the build on our YouTube channel, and watch this space — the sweep is only getting started.
