So what is a Wifi race? Here’s the basic scenario. An off-the-shelf Linksys AP is mounted to a board and connected to a web server (also mounted on the board), both are plugged into an inverter stuck in the back seat of a car driving around downtown Nashville ( a.k.a. THE FOX). Our mission was to find it. Once we found it, we needed to associate with it, then scan the network for the web server and pull it up in a browser. On the web page that came up was the info we needed to win. I think it was a picture, a code and a phone number.

Now here’s our story…

In our minivan we had an omnidirectional antenna, and a directional antenna attached to a tripod. Each antenna was plugged into a different laptop. The two guys with the laptops were looking for the fox. One person drove and did not operate any kind of computer equipment (for safety, and legal, reasons), and the fourth member of the team sat in the front passenger seat with a laptop hooked up to a GPS device making certain we didn’t get lost. The basic plan was to find the fox with the omni, and pinpoint his location with the directional. Our first glimpse of the fox was within the first five minutes of the competition, but it was only for a few seconds. The we drove around for a bit. I was monitoring the directional antenna, but the sudden starts and stops, and sharp turns associated with driving around in downtown Nashville, while I was monitoring Kismet on my laptop watching dozens of access points scroll by the screen every second started to make me sick. And within 30 minutes of the start of the race I was puking on the sidewalk. So we decided I should drive, and poorchoices took over my job. FYI, our team consisted of myself, poorchoices, vollmond, and EULA. So we drove around a bit longer, ended up outside of the playing field because EULA(the navigator) didn’t realize the street he told me to turn on was one-way. So we went down a couple blocks and turned left, then turned left on another one-way street. We were in the left lane of a three-lane one way street. There was a truck in the center lane right next to us, and he decided to make a sudden left turn from the center lane, which led to the following pictures:

So… we were stuck waiting for the police to come and fill out a report for about an hour.

After that incident was over, we got back into the race, and found the fox several times, but he kept getting away from us. In the end, about 15 minutes before the race would be over the fox was found by a family (mom, dad and two kids) in a minivan.

Our equipment seemed to work pretty good, and at the end of the day kismet had detected over 800 networks!!!

Overall it was fun, even with the mishaps, and nobody got hurt, so we’ll let the insurance companies work the rest out.

We’re thinking we’d like to do something like this in Joplin. Anybody interested?

Wifi race logs Here’s the logs kismet output from our directional.  Use tcpdump, or Wireshark to view.