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HOW-TO Tuesday: War Kayaking

Phillip Torrone
Updated ·5 min read

As the summer approaches, we crawl out of our protective wired covered lairs to sometimes partake in outdoor activity. Last weekend, we went kayaking around Lake Union in Seattle, WA and of course, we couldn't help but bring along a lot of equipment and decided we'd hunt for open wireless spots, this friends- was "War Kayaking" we found a ton, charted it with GPS, Wifi finders and we'll show you how we did it for this week's HOW-TO Tuesday.

video


Here's a video of what we did and all the details are below. Click here to view (Windows Media).

Getting started (Hardware)

For our War Kayaking adventure we packed our bag with the following:

  • Pocket PC 2215 + Symbol Wireless card

  • Sony Ericsson p900 phone

  • Garmin Forerunner GPS watch

  • Sony t1 5 Megapixel camera

  • Motorola i730 phone

  • One energy bar

  • One bottle of water (16 ounces)

  • All the gear was placed in plastic bags and sealed

supplies


One more thing...before we left we installed "WifiFoFum" a wireless tool for the Pocket PC which gives a pretty good radar-like display of Wifi spots and also saves the log. It's small, fast, free and works great. It also reminds us of those "Fish Finders" which was somewhat fitting.

wififofum

We then headed off to the Kayak rental place in Seattle, WA. For about $12 per hour you can kayak around one of the most amazing places in the world with views of the city of Seattle, the Space Needle, Mt. Rainer as well as tons of sail boats, yachts, sea planes and more. All that and there are like a million Wifi spots since all the folks who own house boats and all the businesses around the area use wireless.

And we're off

pushing off


Here we are pushing back from the kayak place. We paddled out past where all the onlookers are at and then began to fire out all the gear.

Getting location

watch


Using the Garmin Forerunner GPS watch, we starting logging out position. While this device is meant for land, it works perfectly on water as well. In one of our past "HOW-TOs" we showed you how to take the data from this GPS watch and make a satellite photo map, we'll be doing that again as well.

Looking for Wireless

pocket pc

Next up, we cranked up our HP Pocket PC 2215 with Symbol wireless card. Using the application WifiFoFumwe immediately starting seeing which open spots were in the area, we set the Pocket PC to dim its screen and not turn off, we figured we'd get a couple hours of battery and we'd be able to hear the sounds from the Pocket PC as we paddle around and it finds new spots. We put the Pocket PC back in its plastic baggie and started to paddle around.

Paddle paddle
For the next hour we paddled a little over 3 miles in a variety of different areas- every few seconds or so we picked up a new Wifi spot, our Pocket PC was set to automatically use open Wifi spots so we were able to check email, instant message, log on to IRC (#joiito on freenode)and do everything you'd expect, but all from a kayak. As we instant messaged our friends "hey, i'm in a kayak" we're quite sure they didn't really think we were, well- now they're going to read this and see we suppose.

Here are a few pictures of our War Kayaking trip

photos



If you want to see more, click here and then click the "next" button. As we took photos, we uploaded them to our "moblog" a photo journal you can send photos to.

The spots
We found a lot of spot to connect up to, some were really strong, some weak, all the ones we were really interested in needed to be strong enough to be available at least 150 feet away or more. We noted which ones popped up on the Wifi radar, and later compared them with our GPS data. The best open spots we found are as follows (SSID):

Evado, temptress, NETGEAR, NETGEAR, bbx, blackberry, bbx, KIP, Evado, Armegedon, cortwe, dexter202, linksys, bbx, lind3, gil1, SWN, MultiLocal, WPSI, defaulttlam, wireless, MoinMoin, Dulcinea, WLAN, weises,AP_Router.

Although we didn't list all of them here, it's worth noting that about 30% were "linksys" and another 30% were "NETGEAR".

Mapping the War
After a great run, we decided it was time to head back. We managed not to destroy a couple thousand dollars worth of gear with water damage and we also didn't get mashed by a landing sea plane, one close call- but it was all good.

We did a data dump from the GPS watch, parsed the XML and then mapped it to our notes and Wifi logs. This is still a somewhat manual process, but it only took about 20 minutes. Here is our XML file.

From there we placed the approximate wifi spots over the Satellite map with route we created. We did this by noting the time stamp on the XML lat and long entry along with the Pocket PC time stamp on the wifi log.

wifimap



Click here to see a large version of the Satellite map with Wifi spots.

And, if you want to check out our speed, click here to see a SVG map with speed and location (no Wifi, just speed).

And that's it
So, with a few plastic baggies, a wifi card, Pocket PC and a free application you too can make kayaking a little more interesting. If we start getting in to kayaking more, we're likely to make a stand alone mount for a kayak that has the Pocket PC mounted and will give a visual and audible indication where the strongest wifi signals are as we paddle around. And if you've been keeping up with our latest HOW-TOs we're mostly likely going to attempt the first ever kayak based pirate radio station soon, downloading music on the kayak via Wifi, and then broadcasting as we paddle, should be cool. Questions? Comments? Email: torrone@gmail.com