War Driving Laptop

The gear needed for wardriving

9 posts • Page 1 of 1

Postby micksam7 » Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:25 am

Hi all. First post for me .

My War Driving Laptop, a old[ish] Dell Inspiron 2200. About 2 years old now, just got a little more serious about war driving and got a new antenna and wifi card.

Pic with my cheap ms-branded gps.
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I use a 7.5 dB omni with a nice large mag-base.
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Drilled a hole and put a antenna hookup on the side of the laptop. Keeps me from needing to carry a external card.
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Reverse-SMA[?] connector since a N connector would be a tad too large. :)
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Inside: a 400mW Atheros mini-pci card. [No I don't operate it at that power ;)]
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I have both the dell internal antenna [which is a metal panel behind the monitor] and the external antenna connector hooked up. I've tested, the internal antenna hooked up or not with the external one doesn't change results during war driving [with kismet at least].

What sucks: My atheros card does not like netstumbler, at all. Shows same networks as active no matter how far you get from them. Very weird really. [Window's Wifi finder does same thing if you continously refresh it]
Linux driver oddly shows signal strength and quality a lot lower then what windows driver does. [I can get a signal on the other side of my yard on windows, but nothing past a few rooms on linux, boo to that, allwell]

Other pics: Watch for wires [duh?] - Broken Antenna [bro sat on it ;) - replaced now]

Comments? :P

Postby argh » Sun Apr 01, 2007 5:09 pm

Nice hardware hack! Pigtails with tiny connectors can get a hard way to go in a vehicle. Where did you hook coax into the mini-PCI card?

Postby mrmeebles » Tue Apr 03, 2007 3:47 am

I was going to do the same with an atheros card and
a hirose / ufl to n male connector.
I got the stuff but the reception of the supposedly wonderfil mini-pci card was disappointing. So the stress of use two atheros cards at the same time and taking my laptop's (a gateway 7426gx) life in my hands didn't seem worth the bother. Though this does rekindle the desire a bit.

I have the same mag mount. What's the antenna?
Well people, i am a college student of 21. I bought a laptop and am trying to make it so that I can share files between the desktop and the laptop, and also print from the laptop directly to the printer that's connected to the desktop. How to get laptop to see desktop and its resources? Any helpful information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.
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lexmark printers
Last edited by jumbika on Sat Oct 25, 2008 7:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
Well people, i am a college student of 21. I bought a laptop and am trying to make it so that I can share files between the desktop and the laptop, and also print from the laptop directly to the printer that's connected to the desktop. How to get laptop to see desktop and its resources? Any helpful information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.
Why did you post this question in this thread of this forum?

Using Google, or asking this in a networking forum would be better.

Has nothing to do with Wigle... Has nothing to do with War Driving Laptops.

I'm at such a loss of words... I.. (sigh)
Well people, i am a college student of 21. I bought a laptop and am trying to make it so that I can share files between the desktop and the laptop, and also print from the laptop directly to the printer that's connected to the desktop. How to get laptop to see desktop and its resources? Any helpful information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.
Why did you post this question in this thread of this forum?

Using Google, or asking this in a networking forum would be better.

Has nothing to do with Wigle... Has nothing to do with War Driving Laptops.

I'm at such a loss of words... I.. (sigh)
Methinks we need to get G8t over here with the n00bat from ns.org. ;)

Postby dagaroth » Thu Oct 23, 2008 11:56 pm

yeah, so... um, I really have no comment to add, other than

+1?

Thats not really true. Nice mod, I'm a fan of clean installs, and I'd have to say that one makes me proud. Now to get you to nuke winblows and rock da linux :P
[url=http://web.archive.org/web/20070818191953/http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com/]The Internet is Serious Business[/url]
[url=http://profile.xfire.com/laureal][img]http://miniprofile.xfire.com/bg/sh/type/0/laureal.png[/img][/url]

Postby micksam7 » Sat Jun 06, 2009 2:54 am

And I post 2 years later ... if anyone is still curious:

@ argh - That's a U-FL to R-SMA connector on the side. U-FL is connected to the mini-pci card, as you can see on the inside pic [the off-white patterned wire going to the card].

@ mrmeebles - The place I got the antenna no longer exists. The manufacturer itself no longer makes the antenna, but this one is similar without the N connector.

@ dagaroth - If you check, I'm running ubuntu in those pics. :P Using kubuntu now-a-days.

Also have kinda updated my rig since first post up there. :) Added a second laptop as a kismet drone, wired into the car trunk. Also added a yagi antenna aimed out the side to try and grab distant farm-houses and such, rural area. Yeah, it doesn't get much usually. ;)

Postby argh » Sat Jun 06, 2009 6:59 am

WB micksam7. Two posts in thre years? You're going to have to try to keep that down a bit, you're spending too much time here....... j/k

I have been using an old Panasonic Toughbook CF-28. I'm preparing to mount jacks on the side of it as well. The run internally from the mini-PCI to the jack location is longer than I'd like, but others have made it work.

It's old and slow, but it survives life in a vehicle very well. It's running the latest sidux.com with XFCE for a GUI, but I really don't even start the GUI very often. I have some aliases set up in .bashrc, I hit one key, and off it goes. I had a line on a bargain/older Toughbook CF-27 that I was going to make into a dedicated trunk monkey, but I couldn't get it.

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