Intro

For the last few months I have been participating in a sport called Wardriving. My interested in wireless networks started last year when I decided to purchase a WAP and Wireless Card. As with anything that I become interested in, I had to learn more about it and had to have more toys to accommodate my new hobby. Three weeks ago I purchased the Platinum WarDriving Kit 802.11g 5xSpeed/4xDist. from War Driving World a company I stumbled upon while looking for a new wireless card with an external antenna. This is the best of the best when it comes to wireless cards. If your interested in Wardriving, this is a must have!

The Package

As you can see in the picture below, the item was shipped via USPS Priority Mail and had lots of packing inside. The Buffalo g54 card was shipped inside it's factory sealed box, the antenna was wrapped in bubble wrap, the base was also wrapped in bubble wrap and the cd was inside the cd envelope. I was impressed with the care taken to make sure nothing would happen to these items during shipping.

The Contents

• 1 Buffalo WLI-CB-C54A Wireless card
• 1 7.0 dbi magnetic mobile antenna
• 1 Cork-lined desk stand
• 1 CD with Netstumbler software & articles regarding Wardriving

I'll start with the cork-lined desk stand which is obviously put together by hand. By far this is the cheesiest thing in the entire package. This consists of a metal electrical plate, painted gray with a yellow spot in the middle, glued to a cork coaster (you know those round things you place your drinking glasses on). Regardless, it does serve it's purpose well.

The CD which contains one of the most popular Wardriving software programs. Netstumbler is just an awesome "beggerware" program, if you would like more information about this program you can always visit the Netstumbler website. Also on the CD was some very useful and informative information regarding Wardriving. The following is an excerpt of from one of the articles:

"Wardriving is the gathering of statistics about wireless networks in a given area by listening for their publicly available broadcast beacons. Wireless access points (APs) announce their presence at set intervals (usually 100 milliseconds) by broadcasting a packet containing their service set identifier (SSID) and several other data items. A stumbling utility running on a portable computer of some sort (a laptop or PDA) listens for these broadcasts and records the data that the AP makes publicly available."

and one more:

"The legality of wardriving hasn't been tested, but few people think that wardriving itself is illegal. What is certainly illegal is connecting to and using networks without the network owner's permission (which is what most people call "breaking into a network") and wardriving has taken some hits in the press because network crackers will sometimes use wardriving tools to locate networks to break into. It's the ancient conundrum of the uses to which tools are put: A crowbar is handy for taking apart pallets for use as firewood, but a crowbar can also be used to break into buildings. Should crowbars then be illegal? Hardly. The gotcha is that this is a very new phenomenon, and the law hasn't entirely caught up with networking as a whole, much less the peripheral issues that emerge with regularity from the seething cauldron of technology innovation.

To keep wardriving legal, it's important to 1) obey the law as it exists today, and 2) do our best to encourage journalists to draw the distinction between wardriving tools and their abuse by crackers. Public perception is extremely important. If you connect to other people's networks illegally, it's your butt in a sling and nobody else's, but if you brag about it and the press picks it up, you hurt us all."

The omnidirectional antenna with a mobile magnet is 9 inches tall, has a 7 foot (84") low-loss cable with an MC connector and looks like a cell phone antenna. The 7.0dBi gain increases the Buffalo's range by 4x, now that is impressive!

What makes the Buffalo WLI-CB-C54A wireless card so impressive is that it's well designed and it's one of the few PCMCIA cards with an external antenna connector and look at it's specs:

Now, put it all together and what do you have, a Wardriver's dream come true.