New To Vistumbler

[Go3Team]

I've been using Vistumbler for a few weeks now, and finally got a GPS antenna to stick on the car to do some wardriving again. It seems when I used Netstumbler back in the day, it would register APs pretty quickly. After test driving Vistumbler tonight on the way home from work, it doesn't seem to register as quickly, for instance, sitting still for a certain amount of time like at a stoplight will pick up some AP's. It's pretty hit or miss while driving, as all of the sudden, a bunch of APs will be found, and all will register at the same Lat/Lon.

At the moment, I have a Atom powered Netbook (which is what I used tonight), and a Quad Core Laptop (which is probably too big to wardrive with) sitting side by side running Vistumbler. The loop time on the Netbook is 3 times slower than the Laptop, both are set @ 250ms.

Assuming that CPU power helps with loop times, would the wireless adapter hardware matter as well? I'm thinking one day while I'm bored, putting both the netbook, the laptop, and dusting off the WinXP laptop I used with Netstumbler, and see which one picks up the most APs.

Anyone have any pointers to speed things up a bit?

I also uploaded my drive tonight, if you look at it on Google Earth, you can see the spots where there are like 10 or so APs registering at the same location:
http://www.vistumbler.net/wifidb/opt/us ... 42e022dea2

Thanks

[ACalcutt]

One suggestion is turn of the option "Add new APs to top" (in the View of Options menu depending on your version), which helps a lot in areas with a lot of APs. I usually do this when i go out for a scan to improve speed/results.

I will add some more comments when I'm not so late

[pferland]

The main reason Vistumbler is 'slower' at detecting APs is that Netstumbler didn't use windows to talk to the WiFi card, it just went strait to the hardware. Vistumbler uses the NetSH service in Windows Vista and 7, with some limited support for Windows native wireless in WinXP.

The Atom is probably your main problem, although it should have enough power to handle Vistumbler alone without the AutoKML running. Also 250ms is an insane time to have for the atom, that is basically saying that you want to do one loop every 250ms, vs the default of 1000ms.

A more powerful WiFi card would help, but is not very necessary, I can pick up APs off the highway doing 80mph with my crappy Broadcom card.

Andrew does make a good point, add new APs to the bottom and it will improve the performance.

-Phil

Andrew its only 9AM... lol

[ACalcutt]

Hey, it wasn't quite 9...I still had 7 minutes to take my 20 minute trip to work

[ACalcutt]

I really don't recommend below 1000ms anyway. You don't really gain a lot by refreshing that fast, and when you have a lot of APs around you it will never go that fast anyway. You are also making the data vistumbler needs to keep track of much greater, which can also slow it down after a while.

[Go3Team]

I went for a drive today, with it still at 250, and the actual loop time was showing around 3-4000ms (w/ the GPS going as well), which if my tired brain remembers right is 3-4 seconds per loop. It seems the program adds a bunch at the same time. I imagine the actual loop time will still be around the same whether its set at 250 or 1000.

Hopefully as soon as I get my inverter wired up, I can put the quad core in the car and go for a drive, and see if it's any different.

All in all, great program.

[ACalcutt]

my laptop stays steady at about 1000ms(because that is my default loop time), but i can go to 250ms (its still not good for long scans, more short term scanning)

I am using a Core 2 duo 2.5ghz cpu to get these results though...i know vistumbler was a lot more cpu intensive on my old pentium M, so i'm not sure how it works on an atom.

I can definitely see what you are talking about with your scans. you have big groups of access points that are spread far apart. your quad core should do a lot better. once you start adding google earth into the mix you will definitely want the quadcore.

[pferland]

My little Turion X2 struggles with Google Earth running on it at the same time
But without it, Vistumbler runs like a charm