Yesterday I was wardriving on my Averatec laptop — which I really shouldn’t have. I say that because I have a 140W car DC->AC adapter — which is ok for most laptops, but not the Averatec. The Av draws 120v @ 2Amps which equals about 240Watts — a bit over. Opps.
So today I switched over to my work laptop which draws a good bit less power (just about 100Watts I belive). I took it for a quick spin at lunch and found it was MUCH more sensitive to wireless signals (still running on an internal card). I managed to pick up 100 AP’s on the drive to lunch, on the way back I took the same route but made a short detoure — total trip time — about 10 minutes. AP’s hit — 193. Holy Crap. Thats more AP’s than I picked up yesterday. (Map linked on left — again thanks to GPSVisualizer.Com)
Of course this makes me want to have an even better antena — so I bought (on Ebay) a 7DBI Omnidirectional Antenna & Orinoco Gold PCMCIA card. Hopefully it will show up before I leave for the bay for the holidays. If it does it will be really awesome to wardrive 200+ miles.