Find my wifi location

How does wifi determine a device’s location? [duplicate]

When I use any location based app or website, how does it know that my laptop or smartphone is where it is?

2 Answers 2

Purely Wi-Fi-based geolocation requires an active Internet connection, and is done by doing a Wi-Fi scan, noting the BSSIDs (the unique numeric hardware MAC addresses) of the Wi-Fi APs (wireless routers) in range, and sending that list of BSSIDs to a web service that looks up the known geo-coordinates of those APs, and reports back what your geo-coordinates must be, based on what APs you’re closest to.

The databases of what Wi-Fi APs are where are kept up to date by smartphones and 3G/4G tablets. Those devices have GPS receivers in them, so they know where they are by GPS. They periodically check their GPS location, and then do a Wi-Fi scan to see which APs are nearby. Then they report that information back to the vendor (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) so that those vendors can keep their Wi-Fi geolocation databases up to date.

Devices that have GPS can’t always get a good signal lock on enough GPS satellites to tell their position accurately (indoors, or in «urban canyons» among tall buildings, or in vehicles), so sometimes Wi-Fi-based geolocation can be used to assist GPS. Also, for devices that have WWAN radios (smartphones, 3G/4G tablets, etc.), location of cell towers can be used as well.

It’s possible to do Wi-Fi geolocation without an Internet connection, but to do that, you’d have to cache a copy of the database, which might be too big. But a smartphone might have an optimization where it caches sections of the database for the city/area it already knows you’re in, so that even if you don’t have an Internet connection later in the same day in the same region, it can still look up your current position using the cached part of the database. If law enforcement gets ahold of your phone, they could possibly look at what areas your phone has cached as evidence of where your phone was on what date within the last few days.

Modern OSes use these methods together (GPS, cell tower, Wi-Fi) to get an idea of where your device is, and make that available to apps via a «Location Services» API. For websites, there’s a web browser standard geolocation API. OSes and web browsers that offer these APIs usually ensure that the user must be prompted for permission before an app or website is allowed to use the API to determine where you are.

The least reliable method of geolocation is IP-address-based geolocation, or «GeoIP». That uses public records of what IP address ranges have been assigned to which regional ISPs, or which IP address ranges have been known to be deployed in various cities/regions by bigger ISPs. That’s how sketchy websites offer you ads for meeting hot sexy singles in $YOURCITY tonight. Because any website (or web ad server) you connect to can see which IP address your HTTP request came from, they can use this to get an idea of what city you’re probably in, without using the web browser geolocation API, thus without you being prompted to give permission.

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How to locate an access point

Usually, locating an access point requires the use of a spectrum analyzer, such as HackRF, or a Wi-Fi analyzer for trying to determine the access point location by proximity according to signal strength.

Along many different Wi-Fi network analysis, we have found that suspicious or unknown network signal transmission sources could come from unusual locations such as a solar Wi-Fi card mounted on a building, a surveillance video camera, a Wi-Fi router at a maintenance room, or an automated robot at a factory. Locating these access points was necessary for evaluating their impact on the surveyed wireless network security and for keeping an AP inventory up-to-date.

Therefore, having an appropriate Wi-Fi tracking and device triangulation tool for access point location is often very useful, and our team has added these capabilities to Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps, our Wi-Fi site survey software.

Locating an Access Point

In order to locate a wifi access point, we have to first create a site survey project on Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps. Once the project has been created, site signal strength measurements must be performed using the three available methods:

• GPS capture: If you have a GPS device, with coverage, simply move through the area to be analyzed with the GPS activated.
• Manual capture over blueprint or satellite map: Select each location where network and signal strength measurements will be performed over a building blueprint or satellite map (Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc.).
• Continuous capture: On Continuous mode, you will only have to click on any place in the blueprint or satellite map to start moving through the surveyed area, to then select the final position once you have finished.

After completing this process, which usually takes from 5 to 30 minutes, depending on the dimensions of the area to perform the Wi-Fi coverage or access point triangulation and location analysis, Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps will automatically use several advanced triangulation algorithms to accurately locate all identified access points.

By default, only those access points detected to have a -70dbm or stronger signal are located. You can do this task manually or you can have the software re-calculate an access point location, and the results can be exported to a Word or Google Earth compatible file.

Access point triangulation visualization can also be enhanced by using a Wi-Fi heatmap and its level curves.

If, for any reason, you need to locate a WiFi access point, Acrylic Wi-Fi Heatmaps is the software that you are looking for. Download the fully-functional free 15-day trial version now!

So tell us, what was the strangest place where you have found an access point?

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Find your Wi-Fi device using the Google Geolocation API

Your Particle Photon can discover where it is using the same technology your browser or phone uses, by scanning for nearby WiFi networks!

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Story

Knowing your location in the world is a game changer. Besides simply understanding where you are physically, location is the key to a tremendous amount of value and supporting information.

Okay so your coordinates are X,Y, who cares, right? Well, with a simple set of coordinates, you can find local weather and forecasts , census insights , crime stats , relative motion , underlying soil geography , bodies of water , nearby businesses , provide navigation , customer insights , create location based alerts , asset recovery, real-time real-world gaming, etc, etc. Knowing your location is the difference between simply having data, and having data with a global and human context .

Excited?! «How do I get this precious resource?» You ask? I’ll tell you! It’s easy!

You’ve probably heard of GPS, well we’re not going to use that today. GPS is awesome, but the signals are weak and don’t reach indoors or bounce around too much in dense urban environments. Lots of companies figured this out a while back, and realized that your Wi-Fi router at home (with a range of 100-300 feet) doesn’t move very often. If only we could record the location of those Wi-Fi routers, then anything that could see a Wi-Fi network could figure out where it was!

Using this stored location, services can perform trilateration to make a pretty decent guess about where you are.

WiFi assisted geolocation was such a great idea that all the major mobile phone providers started collecting this data and using it, companies literally started driving GPS-enabled trucks that record Wi-Fi router locations, and your browser already uses these systems to find itself with a scan for nearby networks thanks to the HTML5 Geolocation Standard. So let’s take a minute and thank them for building a neat thing. Thanks!

We’re going to craft a message that any standard browser geolocation service can understand. Since Google has an awesome geolocation service we can use , and they make it easy to get an API key , let’s start there!

But how can I find my Particle Photon , you ask?

Checkout the code example below, and flash it to your Particle Photon . Then create the included webhook «google_locate» to catch the scan results, and ask Google for your location!

If you’re using the CLI, save those hook files to JSON, add your API keys and run:

particle webhook create google_locate.json 

If you’re using the web console , creating the hook will look more like this:

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How to Find the Exact Location of Wifi Router

Sometime it becomes necessary to find the exact location of point of Wi-Fi routing. It is needed for various purposes. If you want to check whether your Wi-Fi courage is hot, low or between them, it can be figured out if you know the exact position of Wi-Fi router.

Before going in detail on how to find the exact location of the Wifi router, we will review the software which we will be using for finding the Wifi router location. InSSIDer is a wonderful software which gives details of each Wifi connection in the user’s surrounding.

InSSIDer

It is completely free for home and non-commercial use. It can be used to optimize and troubleshoot the Wi-Fi. This is used for small organizations like home, small offices and like that. It responds quickly and helps you to figure out what is the strength of your connection.

• By clicking on next , you will install this software and can enjoy to find the location of your Wi-Fi points.

How it works

When you open it after downloading, it will takes you into the screen where all available Wi-Fi are shown.

When you click on the Wi-Fi you are connecting with, it will show you its strength by giving you the bandwidth. which tell you the strength of your connection

And if you want to compare your connection speed with all available Wi-Fi networks to check which one is better, just simple click on all the connections, this software will show you their strength too by making a spectrum of bandwidth with different colors

This software is also showing you which security level your network is using , just simple click on network and the security information is visible to you. Then you will check whether it is appropriate or not. If not you can change it according to your will on the top window as shown in screen shot.

On the right side window ,you can also see all other information related to that network. And after checking all these ,you can decide which network is best for you and can provide you the best speed and fast connectivity.

Functionality

• It measures Wi-Fi strength and estimate the overall performance of your connection.
• It will tell you which Wi-Fi is with better strength by comparing all present Wi-Fi and represent it by a graph.
• It has a concern regarding security and tell the security level of your Wi-Fi.

How to locate exact Position of Wi-Fi Router

To locate the exact location of our Wi-Fi Router we have to figure out how far away we are from router. We can find this through Signal Strength Value. If our signal strength value is low, means it is ranging from -30dBm to -70dBm it would be alright but if its go beyond from -70dBm that means strength value is going high so Wi-Fi point is going out of our range. As from below screen shot, the Wi-Fi “Connect” is having Strength value -40dBm, which means that we are somewhere near the Wi-Fi point so just move little closer so that you’ll be at exact Wi-Fi’s location. This is how you can figure out the exact Wi-Fi location through measuring the Signal Strength Value of your connection.

This is how you can easily figure out all access points of your Wi-Fi connection and this software can helps you a lot in making your Wi-Fi more powerful and secure.

Just follow these easy steps to find the strength and performance of your Wi-Fi connection. I hope this will lead you the clear understanding of noticing the Wi-Fi access points of yours network.

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