WiGLE.net

Forum's a bit quiet so let's talk about min-maxing the war experience.

Here's a simple trick: just take public transportation! Some of the time I get GPS signal while in trains. A lot of the time I'll have signal while in buses. Take an adventure somewhere new in your neighborhood while you're at it.

I run with a handful of random android devices, here's thing I've noticed over the years, personal experience, ymmv, etc:

Options/settings: Each device is different. I go with a "who needs battery life give me more dots on maps" standpoint. All but one of my devices do best with scanning set to constant. Set your devices to scan every 10 seconds, and watch the scan time and amount of APs found. Note the longest amount of time it takes the device to finish a scan, and set your scan time just above that. The one phone seems to override the last scan when a new scan is called for, killing scanning the entire range of wifi bands. Watch how your devices handle it. If they can run constant scan, do that. Constant gps updates seems to jam up most my junk phones. The 'check if wifi is jammed' option is hit or miss, you just have to watch the phone and see if it handles it well. Outside of constant wifi scan, leaving settings at default seems the best bet usually.

From personal experience, bluetooth scanning kills performance on all of my devices. I have one junk phone that's a damn bluetooth monster, but even on it, the wifi scans come back lower. If you're looking to become top of the wifi rankings, scooping up everything in an untouched neighborhood, I honestly can't recommend scanning bluetooth. Sorry wigle crew

25mph seems to be the max speed to roll for maximum results.

Untouched neighborhoods are nice, normal apartment complexes are hit-or-miss, but the spots I've seen that'll let you pull in 10k+ new APs are the brand new hipster looking apartment complexes on the outside of town, or in newly gentrified areas. Make a loop or two of those and watch the new APs go through the roof. Older complexes can take a lot of time to navigate around with not a lot of results. I seriously pulled 11k new APs from one of these.

There was a defcon wigle talk years ago where the guy said he puts his devices up in his front windows. Do That. Shove em in your visors and let em stick down a bit, whatever, but get em up high exposed to the window, worlds of difference.

Don't skip a day. Even on your standard commute, you can get 100 APs a day, they add up.

If you live on a busy street, work on a busy street/highway, leave the devices running in your car. You can get an easy 50-100 "Bob's silverado"'s. And it's funny to watch your little office become a giant hotspot on the map over a year.

I've thought about doing the uber/whatever food delivery thing just to have an excuse to hit up places I wouldn't normally be.

Don't drive a sports car. Running neighborhoods in a unique sports car turn too many heads. It's the one time I recommend a silver/white prius.

And my favorite wigle game is coming up, the map reset on the new year. I've got a kick out of watching the maps slowly build in the city in a new year

Here's an obvious one. GPS units tend to work better if you let them run for a while before you actually need to use them (warm/hot starts, no relation to the temperature of the unit). I mention this because cold starting a GPS can take ages.

I can confirm that walking around large complexes gets lots of APs too. It's almost cheating.

Noted that this is two years old now, but a trick I've learned is to leave one device at home plugged into a battery pack that allows use while plugged in so that if power is lost at some point and device is constantly scanning, it'll still scan in the event of an main failure (better idea is to daisy chain big batteries) . But basically if you can, don't upload constantly. Also lock the app so that you cant close it, and do also try not to reboot device or let it die.

I hoard my nets since upload and upload once every three days. Longest run I had was about 200 miles. Had 3k+ wifi nets 13k for bluetooth. Another is to ride a metro and just let it scan as much as it can.

Noted that this is two years old now, but a trick I've learned is to leave one device at home plugged into a battery pack that allows use while plugged in so that if power is lost at some point and device is constantly scanning, it'll still scan in the event of an main failure (better idea is to daisy chain big batteries) .

This works pretty well for catching IoT devices that go into an AP mode after network connection loss, like google homes. You'll suddenly catch a few new "Kitchen Speaker.O" devices.