Wifi Pirate

Arr!!!, I worked on this wifi project awhile back. I had read on several sites, on multiple people using satellite dishes to receive wifi signals over long distances. Just so happens I had a JVC satellite dish laying around. My goal was to see if I could create a connection with the coffee shop (has free wifi) that is ~5miles away.

I built a Cantenna and mounted it to the front of the dish with electrical tape. Mounted the dish to a swivel (the swivel was for a boat seat).

I tweaked the angle of the cantenna to the dish, by first pointing the dish at my neighbor’s wireless network, then using wood shims to lower or raise the angle of the can until I received the highest signal level. I was using netstumbler with a dell truemobile wireless card.

I was unable to receive the coffee shop’s wifi signal, so what does a pirate do? Well mount it to your pirate ship and sail the seas. So I ended up driving around with the dish just to see how many access points I could receive. After about 40 minutes, I already had logged 200 access points, with about half of them unsecured.

So does this work, yes. Without the dish and just the cantenna I am able to pick-up about 6 wireless signals, that number doubled once the cantenna was mounted to the dish, some of the signals are very weak but I was still able to receive them. Also the dish setup has to be aligned exactly, half-inch off and the signal is completely gone, that’s why I recommend mounting it to a swivel, this made the aligning a simple task. Next step mount the dish to a motorized swivel, it would be great if the dish would auto scan the area and find the best wifi signals to use.