Hacking Wi-Fi

Hacking WiFi Last week, me and Rebecca decided to try and do a little war driving set-up of sorts. Well, not driving per-se, but neighborhood "network analysis", if you know what I'm talking about. With permissions from neighbors ofcourse (ofcourse!). So, we started out by ripping open her HP-Lucent wifi modem, which did not have an external antenna - and what do we find? The damn thing has a PCMCIA wifi card inside, hooked to a USB adapter. Wow, and they actually charge an arm and a leg for those things. Anyway, we take the thing apart, and build a make-shift antenna out of some spare wire and Becca's old Sprint cellphone (which looks something like the one below).

But then, this by itself does not really improve the reception much, so we also built a parabolic reflector antenna from an, errr, Pringles can. We used the original template of a deep dish cylindrical parabolic antenna, and it came out quite well!

[That would be the picture from the freeantennas.com website, just to give you an idea of what a deep dish looks like]

After cutting and sawing off modems, pringles cans, headphones and cellphones, we ended up wiring up the system together - and voila! The system worked perfectly fine, with quite a good reception, although we had to fine tune and mess with the settings a little. More importantly, Becca tells me that it hardly ever drops connections, so that's an excellent thing. Stay tuned for more pictures and the like, from your friendly neighborhood antenna builders. =) Update: Rebecca's updated her blog with a link-back.