I was told by a Mfg. rep that Netstumbler will not work with his client radio ethernet bridge because netstumbler is only for wifi client adapters. Can this be?
I have heard that netstumbler is good for surveys and others have said it is "listening to one end of a screwdriver to tune a car".
Are there better low cost alternatives to netstumbler, which seems to be severely limited by chipset of mfg. to properly aim a wifi antenna?
For TV signals they use a field strength meter. Without laying out big bucks, what can the average hobbiest use to survey a site and determine the direction of the strongest signals? _________________________________________ Usenet Zone Free Binaries Usenet Server More than 140,000 groups Unlimited download
Basically true. Netstumbler requires an NDIS5 Windoze driver to operate. The driver returns the various wireless statistics. These statistics are not available in an ethernet card driver as used in a "client radio ethernet bridge".
The exception is Kismet drone, where Kismet is actually running on the ethernet client radio.
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My opinion is that it's marginal for site surveys because it doesn't show clients and radios with hidden SSID's. For site surveys a passive sniffer such as Kismet is much better. It shows just about everything 802.11. What it does NOT show are non-802.11 sources of potential interference. That should be part of any site survey (but usually is not).
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of these will show up either Netstumbler or Kismet and require a spectrum analyzer to see.
See:
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includes Kismet. In boots and runs from a Knoppix Linux "LiveCD". The catch is that it has a limited set of supported hardware.
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In the Windoze world, the main limitation is the lack of a promiscuous mode network driver for the cards. In the Linux world, the main limitation is the lack of cooperation and data from some vendors (i.e. Broadcom).
I have a Wi-Spy spectrum analyzer. It's not the best possible spectrum analyzer, but it's much cheaper than the alternatives.
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use a salad bowl "dish" antenna for directionality.
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not the best, but good enough.
I'm not sure how professional a job you want in the way of a site survey. Article on site survey mapping vendors.
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