I would like to start maping a new area all togther..
What GPS would you recommend...
Anyone in florida....
Anyone in florida looking to start a wireless group...
lol

I just ordered the card from ebay...
any one know if I will need an Antenna to increase reception. (will this card even take an antenna)...
I heard about hacks to increase the range or pcmciawireless cards.... anyone know of a good how to...

Atapi --

I've been using a Lucent Gold card so far and have had quite a bit of luck with it. As long as you're driving around in commercialized areas (plenty of tall office buildings) you'll definitely get signals. My first day out, within an hour I had picked up about 45-50 different AP's. I have the external antenna on order, because for $80 bucks it will help me out further with this project.

As for GPS, I'm currently using the Rand McNally GPS - the one that comes with their mapping software. Works well so far, no issues yet except for the fact that it powers itself off of a keyboard port (and my laptop doesn't have one) so I'm working on an alternative power source for it.

-Doug

Toomer, have you upload any of your stuff to the database? Are you one of the guys doing it in the DC area? I am waiting for my gps before I upload any of my data.

-Dazlug

I cann't seem to get my Delorme Tripmate GPS to work (am i missing something?). I think I'm going to buy a Garmin GPS III+ as I want a decent stand-alone GPS. Can anyone confirm the III+ as working with netsumbler?

Are you outputting NMEA format? I think that is what NS requires.

Dazlug-

Yes, I'm in DC and have been mapping a few areas. I haven't uploaded any data yet. I might soon - I'm still trying to come to a conclusion as to how I feel about making all this data publicly available.

Koss-

The Delorme GPS won't work - it uses a proprietary format. You'll need something that does NEMA format.

-Toomer

Anyone know of a review of NMEA compliant gps's....
I going to purchase one tommorrow...
how about using terraserver for the mapping as well...
might be nice to get an arial view of the data lol...

and will be making my data public. If I don't someone else will (shrug). I know of several others in this area too - secure your WAPs folks if you don't want someone to pick them up. If it's handing out IPs then it must be a public network. I might at some point be interested in joining a public effort too.

There's supposed ot be mapping software that uses the Terraserver maps to show you an overhead view as you drive. I think the site is UK and you have to calibrate the map by inputting two sites etc. Unfortunatly I've nto got th eURL handy. Has anyone seen that?

I'm using a Garmin eMap and find that for this it's more than needed but damned nice standalone once th emaps and memory are upgraded.

>> and will be making my data public. If I don't someone else will (shrug). <<

I agree, but at the same time I disagree. This is why I'm torn on the issue as to whether or not to post data. On the one hand, it's the easiest way to raise general awareness about how widespread this problem is (and will continue to be) unless people start fixing their AP's. And that's something we definitely need - there are way too many open AP's here in DC.

But the "publish the info to raise the awareness" argument doesn't always wash. Take last week's Code Red worm for example -- eEye found the vulnerability and felt that it was their obligation to publish way too much source code about how it actually worked. Both Russ (moderator of NTBugTraq) and Microsoft felt that eEye went too far in their disclosure.

And what did we get from it? A worm that spread to over 350,000 servers on the Internet, and had the potential to do much more damage (if it had been programmed a bit better). As someone who works specifically in the Internet industry, I'm particularly sensitive to these issues. eEye - in my opinion - went too far in publishing as much code as they did. We've not seen the last of the Code Red exploits, and I have a feeling the next few will be much more effective.

In any case, this message isn't intended to target anyone's particular opinion - just to spur debate and further thoughts on this subject.

Here's a thought - perhaps a more noble approach would be to have NetStumbler attempt to make an HTTP request out whenever it's thrown an IP. It could even include the AP name, type, channel, lat/long, etc. A server on the back-end could catch the incoming IP address (since many companies use NAT on the back-end) and an application engine could look up that IP address with ARIN to find out who owns the netblock. An email could be sent to the owner of the net block letting them know that their network is open. This is similar to what some people did with Code Red - since any server that was "attacking" was known to be infected, a few people got smart and filtered through their log files to find all the infected hosts and then sent automated emails out letting the netblock owners they'd been hit.

Can't wait for my external antenna to arrive.

-Toomer