Kismet and your smartphone's GPS

Kismet is much more fun with a GPS device attached, this way you have the ability to view the details of all found networks on a graphical map. So why not use your smartphone's GPS (if you have one, of course) ?

I use a Nokia smartphone with symbian OS installed. To transfer the GPS data to my computer do the following:

Download and install ExtGPS. If your phone can read barcodes, this may speed up things:Enable bluetooth, start ExtGPS and confirm the usage of bluetooth und GPS data.


Wait until you got connected to one or more satellites (the upper dot turns green). If you can't get a connection, be sure to be outside.

Next connect yout phone via bluetooth:

$ sdptool search SP
Inquiring ...
Searching for SP on 00:22:33:44:55:66 ...
...
...
...
Service Name: Symarctic ExtGPS
Service Description: Share phone's built-in GPS module via Bluetooth
Service Provider: Symarctic Solutions
...
...
...
Channel: 5

With the information above (bold) you can create a rfcomm device (as root):

# rfcomm bind 1 00:22:33:44:55:66 5
# ls -l /dev/rfcomm1
crw-rw---- 1 root root 216, 1 2009-07-05 21:00 /dev/rfcomm1

This newly created device can be used as source for gpsd:

# gpsd /dev/rfcomm1

As a last step check the file kismet.conf (look in /etc/kismet/) and enable gps usage:

# Do we have a GPS?
gps=true
# Host:port that GPSD is running on. This can be localhost OR remote!
gpshost=localhost:2947

Once gpsd is running, the lower dot should turn green too.

Now run kismet, from now on your location information will be logged. In the next post I will show how you can convert this data for usage with google earth.