When to survey
- Initial facility setup — Before attestation can begin at a new site, every room needs at least one survey. This is typically done by the lead tech or admin over one or two sessions covering all floors.
- New rooms added to the hierarchy — When admin adds a new floor or room node in the dashboard, a tech surveys those rooms before they go live for attestation work.
- Persistent wrong-room detections — The app consistently places a tech in the wrong room. Re-survey the affected room and its immediate neighbors to refresh the signal fingerprint.
- After a physical change — Access point replaced, significant renovation completed, or major furniture rearrangement. The old fingerprint no longer reflects the room’s actual signal environment.
- Quarterly refresh in high-churn areas — Server rooms, labs, or equipment staging areas where hardware comes and goes frequently benefit from re-surveying every few months to keep fingerprints accurate without waiting for a problem to surface.
What survey captures
When you run a survey capture, the app records 4–6 samples of every Wi-Fi access point and Bluetooth device visible from that spot. It also records barometric pressure (for floor estimation) and magnetic field strength (a stable per-room characteristic based on local metal and structural features). These signals together form a fingerprint unique to that room.Running a survey
1
Open Survey Mode
From the Forager home screen, tap Survey Mode.
2
Select the floor
Use the floor selector at the top to choose which floor you are on. Rooms are grouped by urgency — Needs Attention rooms appear first, followed by Monitor, then Covered. Each row shows the current sample count and days since the last survey.
3
Enter the room
Physically walk into the room you want to survey. Stand near the center, away from doorways. Tap the room in the list.
4
Tap Capture
Tap the Capture button. The app records a set of RF samples — the sample count increments as each one completes. The full capture takes approximately 30 seconds. Stay still — walking or moving between rooms during capture degrades the fingerprint.
5
Repeat for each room on the floor
After the capture completes, tap Back to return to the room list and move to the next room. Work your way through every room on the floor.
Reading the sample count
After a capture completes, the room row shows an updated sample count and quality category. More samples mean a tighter fingerprint and higher confidence during room classification. There is no fixed minimum, but rooms with 3+ captures from different positions in the room consistently reach Covered status. If a capture completes but the sample count does not increase, the app may be having trouble scanning signals. Check that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are enabled on your device.Adding a room during survey
If a room does not appear in the list, tap Add New Room, enter a name and level type (e.g. “Room”, “Zone”), and it will be created under the selected floor. You can then survey it immediately.Pinning rooms to the floor plan
If a floor plan image has been uploaded by your admin, a floor plan view appears at the top of the Survey Mode screen. After completing a capture for a room, you can tap the floor plan to place a pin for that room’s location. This pin is used for visual navigation during Device Hunt and mismatch display. The floor plan view supports pinch-to-zoom and two-finger pan so you can place pins precisely on dense floor plans. Double-tap to zoom in, or tap the reset button in the top-right corner to return to the full-floor fit-to-screen view. If no floor plan is uploaded, survey still works — rooms are tracked by name and location hierarchy only.Survey quality indicators
After surveying, open Coverage to see the quality of each room’s fingerprint.The first survey of a new room creates its fingerprint. Subsequent surveys on the same room refresh it. If room conditions have not changed, you do not need to re-survey frequently — once per quarter is typical unless equipment or layout changes.
Tips for accurate surveys
- Survey each room from the middle of the room, not from a doorway or hallway
- Survey all rooms in a building during the same session when possible — barometric pressure shifts with the weather from day to day, and same-day surveys keep each room’s pressure reading comparable for floor estimation
- Survey at a typical working time — signal density can vary if nearby equipment is off overnight
- If two adjacent rooms are frequently confused by the app, re-survey both from the center of each room with the door closed
- Rooms that share a wall with high-density networking equipment benefit from extra captures