[geeks] WiFi WarDriving

[Lionel Peterson]

Hello all,

I woke up this morning and decided I was going to try my hand at WarDriving - somethng I've never actually done before, but I figured it should be easy.

It was.

I started with a WinXP Pro laptop (a 1.4 GHz Celeron, not that it matters), added a ZyXEL USB WiFi B/G adapter (mainly because it had a long USB cable, so I could easily place it in the car with a clear shot out the windows. Then I attached a low-cost USB GPS receiver that I got bundled with MS Streets & Trips 2005 several years ago. I attached the GPS receiver to the laptop and let it download drivers from the internet. Then I fired up NetStumbler 0.4.0 (latest?), pointed the software to the correct WiFi adapter and GPS receiver, and we were off to the races!

After watching it work on the kitchen table, I got a power inverter and moved the collected bits to my car, hung the GPS puck on a passenger side window, hung the WiFi adapter from the "dry cleaning" hook over the door and drove through my neighborhood.

I gathered up the results, went off to gpsvisualizer.com[0], uploaded my .NS1 data to the web site, and quickly got a map showing the hot spots I found in my neighborhood.

Turns out about 60% of the detected APs are open - wide open, with many of them named "linksys".

Anyway, I thought some here might be interested, and I was wondering if anyone has a different "mapping software" solution - I'd like to be able to process my .NS1 file into a google map and make my map available on a web page. Ideally, I'd rather not have to code anything, though minimal script tweaking is no big deal...

Honestly, I'm suprised how easy/quick it was to set up and do.

Lionel

[0] http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map?form=wifi