Surfing for Wireless

I am new to wireless.

I have a wireless card for my PC. I have XP software. I put in the card and
the machine recognizes that the card is inserted and tells me what connections
are available or tells me no connections are available if none are available.

I want to be able to drive down the road and know whether or not a connection
becomes available. Is there a way to do this? I think that I need something
to "sniff" out an available connection.

Is this possible? What software or hardware do I need?

Please excuse me if I have posted to the wrong group and/or stumbled over
proper terminology.

Thanks.

Tim

On 06 Oct 2004 21:11:15 GMT, (E-Mail Removed) (TWhite8611) wrote:

>I have a wireless card for my PC. I have XP software. I put in the card and
>the machine recognizes that the card is inserted and tells me what connections
>are available or tells me no connections are available if none are available.

Netstumbler. See:
http://www.netstumbler.com
http://www.netstumbler.org

>I want to be able to drive down the road and know whether or not a connection
>becomes available.

Netstumbler 0.4.0 has programmable beeps, and scripting. You can make
it do whatever you want. If you filter by encryption type, you will
be notified only if there is an "open" access point available.


--
# Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
# 831.336.2558 voice http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
# (E-Mail Removed)
# 831.421.6491 digital_pager (E-Mail Removed) AE6KS

Yeah, Netstumbler is cool but it wouldn't work with either of my cards. I
use Boingo. www.boingo.com

It's cool, and free. You can also just use windows to tell you what's
available.


"Jeff Liebermann" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> On 06 Oct 2004 21:11:15 GMT, (E-Mail Removed) (TWhite8611) wrote:
>
>>I have a wireless card for my PC. I have XP software. I put in the card
>>and
>>the machine recognizes that the card is inserted and tells me what
>>connections
>>are available or tells me no connections are available if none are
>>available.
>
> Netstumbler. See:
> http://www.netstumbler.com
> http://www.netstumbler.org
>
>>I want to be able to drive down the road and know whether or not a
>>connection
>>becomes available.
>
> Netstumbler 0.4.0 has programmable beeps, and scripting. You can make
> it do whatever you want. If you filter by encryption type, you will
> be notified only if there is an "open" access point available.
>
>
> --
> # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060
> # 831.336.2558 voice http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
> # (E-Mail Removed)
> # 831.421.6491 digital_pager (E-Mail Removed) AE6KS

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 21:14:30 -0400, "Aaron"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Yeah, Netstumbler is cool but it wouldn't work with either of my cards.

Just about any card works with NetStumbler 0.4.0 on XP using the NDIS2
driver. For Windoze 98/ME, you should use the earlier version 0.3.23
as 0.4.0 doesn't work. What cards on what OS do you claim don't work?

>I use Boingo. www.boingo.com
>
>It's cool, and free. You can also just use windows to tell you what's
>available.

Boigo is run by Earthlink and charges $22/month for service plus $30
for their VPN client. What do you mean by "free" and "cool"? The
Boingo client software is just a fancy formatter for SSID's. It looks
nice, but doesn't have any GPS input, no signal strength graphs, no
MAC address extraction, no S/N ratio, no scripting, and no logging. I
guess the lack of these features makes it "cool".


--
Jeff Liebermann (E-Mail Removed)
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 AE6KS 831-336-2558