WiGLE.net

I often wardrive using a Raspberry Pi running Kismet.

When I started war driving I used a high gain omni-directional on a mag mount on the roof of my vehicle. I had a lot of results.
At some point I upgraded to two yagi antennas on two Alfa USB adapters. The number of results was ridiculous.

Eventually I damaged the wire going to the mag mount on top of my vehicle. I would still get results but they were limited to maybe 50 feet from my vehicle.

One day I was trying to locate a bunch of Cradlepoint APs around where I work and I realized that damaged mag mount was still very useful. I decided to further reduce the range of the mag mount/antenna combo by placing it inside my vehicle and getting the lowest gain antenna I could find. I think it was a 4db omni-directional that is about 3 inches long. Reception varied depending on the strength of the AP but a lot of times I had to be within 20 feet of an AP to pick it up.

Anyway I found the Cradlepoint APs... They were suspended on either telco or cable wires on poles. Now I just need to figure out their purpose.

Anyway I just wanted to share how I turned a damaged antenna into a useful tool...

Dan

there's a real case for low-gain stumbling - it's why we love pocket-based rigs and phones!

You get really accurate portraits of location (in exchange for lower "yield")

Cheers, and keep on stumbling!

-ark

Also consider how the software logs points. Some stumblers might just log the location of when the network was first found. Other stumblers will update the location of the network based on where it saw the signal was strongest meaning more laps will increase data accuracy.