Sniffing 802.15.4 in the wild

June 6, 2011

Freakduino enclosure

My 802.15.4 wardriving setup consists of a 17dBi omnidirectional 2.4GHz antenna connected to a magnetic base attached to a Freaklabs Freakduino attached to a laptop running WSBridge.

Using WSBridge for sniffing 802.15.4 has been roughly described in an earlier post.

This past weekend I setup the sniffer and rode to Huntsville, Alabama. The 90 minute drive yielded zero traffic other than my the test traffic sent from my second Freakduino to check the sniffer.

We ended up driving south of I–565 on Memorial Parkway. Between the Drake and Airport exits, I finally sniffed some traffic!

Wireshark shows multiple 802.15.4 Beacon Requests. I’m guessing that’s a ZigBee mesh network?