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Wardriving with your Pocket PC |
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THE Windows Mobile Pocket PC is quite possibly the ideal tool for wardriving because it's small and much easier to carry around than a bulky notebook, and battery life is usually much longer too - the perfect ingredients for mobile network scanning.
In fact, unlike in 2003 when we first tried out wardriving with a WiFi card in the PCMCIA jacket of our Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC, most Pocket PCs and Windows Mobile Smartphones nowadays come with WiFi built-in, so using one as a WiFi scanner is a lot easier than it once was.
However, the zero configuration WiFi utility that comes with the Windows Mobile operating system is basic at best.
In order to be a more effective war driver, you really need a more sophisticated tool, and for the Pocket PC, there's only one real choice - Aspecto Software's WiFiFoFum (www.aspecto-software.com/rw/applications/wififofum)
Currently in Version 2.1.1, WiFiFoFum is a free WiFi scanning tool that supports the latest Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system as well as the older Pocket PC 2003 models.
WiFiFoFum even supports Pocket PCs with VGA (480 x 640 pixels) resolution, which means that not only is it functional, it's pretty too. :)
As far as wireless network scanners go, WiFiFoFum is pretty full-featured, and is very fast, giving you useful information like the SSID of the wireless network, signal strength and whether WEP is enabled or not.
WiFiFoFum also has a "radar" style interface, which shows you graphically where the wireless network is approximately located relative to you, based on the signal strength of the network.
In fact, WiFiFoFum even supports GPS (Global Positioning System) devices, which means that if you have a Bluetooth GPS or similar unit for your Pocket PC, you can augment what WiFiFoFum shows you with location information.
This location information can then be exported from WiFiFoFum as a file which can be read by some GPS-capable maps (such as Google Earth Plus, the commercial version of the popular satellite imagery software).
In our tests, the Dell Axim running WiFiFoFum performed admirably, detecting networks with astonishing regularity on our short drive.
The only problem was that the application tended to slow down the Axim, making it difficult to run any other applications in addition to WiFiFoFum.
Submitted Date: Aug 11, 2006
Source: Malaysia Star
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