WiFi Antenna Guide
Sunday, October 12th, 2003At WiMo they have a nice (german) guide for antennas and a FAQ about WLAN reception.
Archive for the ‘WiLDing’ Category
My WiLDing Deck
Sunday, October 12th, 2003
I was fed up with installing my wardriving setup in my car just to always tear it out a few hours later so the car could be used for other stuff. So I decided to build something which can be quickly removed and gets rid of the cable mess. The result is a shown in theese pictures.
On the bottom left there is a Garmin GPS 12 unit which can be detatched and placed somewhere else for better reception. Also attached is a serial to USB converter. Next to it is sitting “Rasputin”, an old Wintel notebook with its dockingstation. Together tehese two come with 6 (!) PCMCIA Slots. besides on the right is “bombadil” a G3 “lombard” Powerbook connected via USB to the GPS.
On top of it is the powersupply section consisting a 300W 12V to 230V converter, two the right 12V sockets feeding the converter and the GPS and to the left 3 230V sockets. Below that the Powerbook’s powersupply and a small Lucent antenna mounted on a stand – there is an other antenna with an magnetic stand on the car roof. Between Rasputin and bombadil there is also a elastic pocket for restraining all the superflous cables.
The whole thing can be fixed in the car bei flexible ropes.
gpsdrive
Saturday, October 11th, 2003gpsdrive is a nice moving map software for X11. I use it to optimize my driving when WiLDing.
The included friendsd for version 2.04 has serious security problems. this patch is a first cure.
Maps!
Tuesday, September 30th, 2003
Click on the image at the reight so see the results of our WiLDing session from Saturday rendered as a map. Every red circle is a different WLAN. The black lines show where we have been driving.
Running LAN
Sunday, September 28th, 2003We proudly announce that we will hold this fall a contest combining elements of war driving, geocaching and capture the flag.
You can participate by foot or by car. You should bring 802.11b, spartial orientation (GPS or GLONAS recivers, good maps or something else) and digital imagery equipment and 24h time. The whole event will take place in the Cologne/Bonn area. Exact dates to be announced. If you are interested to participate, please add a comment to this story.
WiLDing again
Sunday, September 28th, 2003Today, after two years absence we started WiLDing/war driving again. This time we started with much more massive equipment. Most important thing: we equipped our scanning-rig with 220V AC power so our trip was not limited by notebook battery time and we were able to run as much power-consuming programs as we liked.
We had a Powerbook G4 equipped with Airport hardware and an ELSA Airlancer PCMCIA card (basically identical to the well known Orinocco Cards) and a Dell notebook with build in WaveLAN and an Orinocco card. We had also two omnidirectional external antennas, one of them the small indoor one from Lucent, the other a 12db one for mounting on the car’s top. We had a Garmin GPS 12 but found out that none of our notebooks had a serial port. So we will try now to merge spatial data logged by the GPS and WiLDing data logged by the notebooks ‘post mortem’.
We ended up in using only on WiFi card per notebook to do the actual scanning and we were missing a pigtail to connect the 12db antenna. Nevertheless it turned out that we where able to locate about one network every 40 seconds. Which is a much higher destiny than two years ago. Also now around 50% of the Networks are encrypted which is an improvement compared to the 30% encrypted networks we found two years ago.
After experimenting with iStumbler, MacStumbler and kismet we settled for KisMac on the Apple machine. On the Wintel machine we tried dstumbler on FreeBSD and then settled for Netstumbler on W2K. It turned out that Netstumbler was not able to utilisize the Orinocco card, we assume a crippled driver was the reason. Also using the “auto configure card” option totally broke scanning.
We placed the Mac in the rear of the car, with the WaveLAN card facing to the rear window. KisMac was set up to read SSID names to us. The Dell Notebook was placed on the passenger but because it is really a sub-notebook with cleverly placed antennas in the screen-lit we where able to keep it in a position with reasonably good reception.
It turns out that using two machines is really a good idea because both machines found networks the other didn’t. Generally the Mac found more networks – probably because the better placement.