NetStumbler.org Forums

Congrats to Helium Networks and Marius on a fantastic product!

I did a survey of a test floor plan and it was a painless process. The SiteStumblerTips.PDF gives a good quick overview of the process.

I have included the default reports and images.

http://wrzwaldo.org/SiteStumbler/


If you want a solid site survey tool without giving up an arm and a leg then this is it.


Monday/Tuesday I am going to survey both floors at work and will post the results.

Note: The only problem I had was with saving the reports. No matter where I told it to save them they always ended up in the folder SiteStumbler is installed in.

The reports look good.

One question though, I'm still lost as to how it detects your location.

From looking through their website it appears they use a special cart that measures distance and direction for their wireless recon product.
Are they using triangulation in place of the cart for the "Sitestumbler"?

Scruge wrote:The reports look good.

One question though, I'm still lost as to how it detects your location.

From looking through their website it appears they use a special cart that measures distance and direction for their wireless recon product.
Are they using triangulation in place of the cart for the "Sitestumbler"?

Yes manually entered measurement points (the blue triangles). You click on the floor plan to enter measurement points.

edit: I just did a scan of our property line and four points near the corners of our house.

ah, I see.

So I could do same thing with NS and a floor plan?

I would take signal reading with ns and then write reading on floor plan where the reading was taken?

Simple but effective.

Scruge wrote:ah, I see.

So I could do same thing with NS and a floor plan?

I would take signal reading with ns and then write reading on floor plan where the reading was taken?

Simple but effective.

Yes that's about it (a little more time consuming). Except your way is about $900.00 cheaper!

wrzwaldo wrote:Yes that's about it (a little more time consuming). Except your way is about $900.00 cheaper!

And you have to do a lot more work on your own, to interpolate the signal strength for the visualization. AFAI understand the way SiteStumbler does it, it takes the reading from the SiteSense client when you click to mark your location on the floorplan. It probably also use all the readings made by the SiteSense client, between this point, and the next point you mark on the floorplan, to interpolate the strength to be visualized.
As Scruge say, you can do it with NS and manually marking the data from NS onto a floorplan.. But I'd still rather use SiteStumbler for the job, especially if it's a job that is going to be done at different location. 900 USD is quickly saved in time costs. Although I'm also going to say that IMHO the price puts it firmly out of range for the casual user/hobbyist, and probably also the SoHo and company > 20 employees.

Dutch

Dutch wrote:And you have to do a lot more work on your own, to interpolate the signal strength for the visualization. AFAI understand the way SiteStumbler does it, it takes the reading from the SiteSense client when you click to mark your location on the floorplan. It probably also use all the readings made by the SiteSense client, between this point, and the next point you mark on the floorplan, to interpolate the strength to be visualized.
Dutch

Is the SiteSense client the special cart?


Seems one could duplicate the Sitestumbler setup using available software.
Scan your floorplan and setup coordinates that can be assigned to NS's or kismet's current active ap readings at each logging point. Just like gps but using x,y coordinates from drawing instead.

You could take it one step further by taking several gps benchmark readings of the exterior perimeter of the floor plan. Which would allow you to convert all the internal x,y coordinates to gps so they could be processed by any of the coverage plotters.

hmmm..

I think I've got an idea for beakmyn's headless wrt..

Rather than feeding the wrt with gps data, hook it up to a cheap serial digitizer that has a copy of floor plan.
Just click the digitizer pen at your current location and the wrt records the ap signal and x,y coordinates provided by the digitizer.
The SD card is then removed and post processed on your computer.

I've got a Summa digitizer for B size drawings which is much to big, but I think one of my sons has a smaller "A" size laying around.

Scruge wrote:Is the SiteSense client the special cart?


Seems one could duplicate the Sitestumbler setup using available software.
Scan your floorplan and setup coordinates that can be assigned to NS's or kismet's current active ap readings at each logging point. Just like gps but using x,y coordinates from drawing instead.

You could take it one step further by taking several gps benchmark readings of the exterior perimeter of the floor plan. Which would allow you to convert all the internal x,y coordinates to gps so they could be processed by any of the coverage plotters.

No, the SiteSense client is the proprietary version of NetStumbler, which is used to do the datacollection. It is used by the SiteStumbler software, and also in the Wireless Recon product from Helium Networks as the WiFi data collection engine. SiteStumbler is a frontend and a visualizing portal for the data, and I'm taking a SWAG that the Wireless Recon software is doing the same in the big package with the measuring cart.

And yes, you could duplicate the SiteStumbler setup with available software, but probably not with the same ease of use and integration.

FWIW, if I was a Wireless integrator, an IT admin at a large site utilizing WiFi, or in a similar position where indoor sitesurveys were necessary on a regular basis, I'd say that the SiteStumbler product was well worth the price, if the Wireless Recon product is considered overkill or too pricey for the same tasks.

I hope MikeP928 will take a look at it and give his input, since he deals with surveying sites regularly... At least when he isn't busy feeding tourons to the gators..

Dutch

Here is the 1st floor at work. I am having problems getting to software to do an analysis of the second floor and will be contacting Walt about it. This survey took me all of about 15 minutes.

Sorry to be so late to ask this.

Were there any changes to the scripting engine? (Assuming SiteStumbler even has a scripting engine.)