Sorry for the length on this one guys but too much info is never a bad thing...(right?
) Also, I hope I posted this in the right place; there is nothing like looking for cookies in the cookie jar and finding 10 day old pieces of pizza and thinking, "What the hell is this doing here!?" (if you catch my meaning). So I apologize in advance. Anywho...
I work for an agency that has wireless AP’s setup all over a city (around 15 probably) that are using 1w (I think) amps and omni antennas. This backhaul network is specifically used for patrol cars and each car is equipped with an amped omni, proxim wireless gold cards using either sr2.2 or sr2.3 drivers, WinXPSp2, and a secondary ‘Bluetree’ wireless device. The SSID (let’s use WIRELESS NET for an example) is the same for all AP’s but the channels, for signal bleeding reasons, are set to 3, 6, and 11. We use BlueTree modems using the Cingular infrastructure network as our failover when wireless reception drops out but it is pretty slow. The system works fairly well but we have a fair amount of ‘holes’ in our network where 802.11b fails and I would like to remedy this. We are planning on deploying and developing a ‘mesh’ network using Orinoco AP4000’s as repeaters and probably placing them at street intersections where we have decent power and backup batteries. I would like to provide our IT team with a decent ‘map’ of where these bad boys need to be deployed.
I am trying to modify the ns04master script to chart in Mappoint (I have MP 04), along the main street routes the officers would likely use, every point in which Netstumbler detects the specific ‘wireless net’ SSID. I envision having it place pins in Mappoint that are the same size in three or four different colors all based on signal strength or SNR. At each level of SNR, the pins placed would be different colors. Let’s say for example, Green for SNR of 28 or better, Yellow for SNR between 27-20, Orange for SNR between 19-15, and Red for SNR 14-5. I’ll have to research what SNR yield to decent data transfer or communication but you get the point. This way, I could have a color coded map of the streets and basically outline a decent deployment area of probable locations where these AP4000’s could go.
I’ve tested the script out already and it seems to work fine in detecting and plotting the points of all access points in the range of my test unit (Which, by the way, I’ll add the specs of at the end of this post). I however would like it to display ONLY every point it detects the ‘wireless net’ network. I have exported the ns1 files as text and found that the data is probably there to do this, I just am not super sure on how to display it. There have been a few posts that I’ve read on this subject to a small extent but nothing definitive. I’m fairly familiar with VB scripting so I’ll hash away at it tonight but any help would be greatly appreciated!
Toshiba CF29 Toughbook
Proxim gold w/ SR 2.3 drivers (I may have to swap these back to 2.2 from what I’ve read in the past few days on this forum)
WinXPSP2
Amped omni, magmount antenna.
Current v. of Netstumbler.
Thanks!
SW