[kismac] Re: Fun with KisMAC and AirportExtreme

  • From: Andrew Koch <ppc603ev@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: kismac@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 11:57:01 -0500

At 1:04 AM -0600 1/2/04, Brad Knowles wrote:

Otherwise, you could drown out radios for various emergency services, the police, the FBI, the US military, etc.... Alternatively, you might be able to use such hardware to listen in on their traffic, which I'm sure they feel is much, much worse.

I highly doubt that a little laptop WiFi card could "drown out" anything else in the 2.4 GHz band, and I'm sure if you could modify the SOFTWARE to allow transmission out of band, HARDWARE radio amplifier limitations would reduce the power output out of band to almost nill...


For example, a Ham radio that I own is modifiable to transmit outside it's normal band. In it's normal band, it outputs 75 watts, but out of band transmissions are as low as 11 watts. This is because the final amplifier circuit in a radio has a relatively narrow bandwidth.

As for listening to stuff, as long as it's not encrypted, there is no law in the US that says you CAN'T listen to it.

I can go down to my local Ham shop and drop $$$ on a receiver that'll pick up everything up to the 3Ghz range. Or on another one that will DECODE (not un-encrypt) APCO-25 Digital Voice Transmissions, which were previously thought to be "un scanable"

Anyway, the only thing that is illegal to listen to in the US is Cellular Telephone (NOT Cordless) and the only cell-phones even NEAR the range that 802.11x devices operate at are PCS 1.9 GHz. Other then that, I don't see anything public safety related in the 2.4 GHz band there, looking over the US Frequency Bandplan chart http://www.lildobe.net/images/2ghzband.jpg
The red squares in there between 2200-2300, 2310-2390 and 2417-2450 ARE "Government Exclusive" blocks, but they are secondary users to the band and share it with many other users. They are probably just Radar frequencies.


--
Andrew Koch - KI4CUN
Website: http://www.lildobe.net

Maintain thy airspeed lest the earth
   shall rise up and smite thee!

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