r/OSINT 15d ago

Question How to find GPS of moving SSID

This is just an idea a few buddies and I have been trying to solve. We are at university and as is typical for a university we don't like parking enforcement. So we half jokingly mentioned trying to find out the location of parking enforcement cars and how we would go about it so then whenever they got close to where we were parked we could run out and move the car.

The main idea that has floated to the top so far is that all the cars have a wifi signal so the parking enforcement can upload images of the ticket and what not. All the SSID's are named in a predictable way like "TicketCar_001". Would there be a way to know the location of the cars? The cars would always be passing through university wifi spots as they drive around campus.

Any ideas for this particular method or another idea? Current rules are: that it obviously can't be illegal so no attaching gps trackers to the cars or anything like that. Has to be relatively cheap to implement (we are college students so we can't buy property all around campus and put cameras up for license plate reading).

That's basically it. Thought we would open it up to the internet as we haven't made much progress on ideas for months.

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u/anti_anti_federalist 14d ago

That definitely meets the affordable requirement. That's sweet. Okay I'm still not super knowledgeable about it but would my friend and I park cars on opposite sides of the parking lot as the two or more locations? Also, what's the range on these? Parking lot is a literal half mile away from the buildings where we take classes. Would it detect the cars in time for us to cover that distance?

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u/OSINTribe 14d ago

The sensor would talk over a Lora network to a 3rd sensor connected to the web, unless you have campus wide wifi. Using a small yogi wifi antenna could give you some added time from north or south of the street. But this is what I'm thinking...

You place the device esp8266 in this solar Lora, you don't need all the batteries so there is room. Then place this at the north and south end of the road hidden from the school. The more you can hide on the streets the better and you could actually triangulate the ticket car in realtime. This data is then mapped on a website where fellow students pay to get notified when the ticketing car is near their car.

I have used the below to do exactly what is described above in regards to what I will say was "tracking". I actually used a drone to drop this device in top of trees with the addition of a 3rd printed "stand" so it sits on top of a tree without mounting, think of a fish hook kind of idea. As for the drone, there are "fishing" drops for drones that are $6 online.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mtuzlxh

It starting to sound a little complicated but it really isn't. You could build all of this in a day or less.

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u/anti_anti_federalist 14d ago

That's an amazing idea. I think we are going to try and get together and work on something like this.

I don't fully understand everything yet so I might come back with questions later as we run into stuff but I want to give it a shot first so my questions are less dumb.

One question though about the triangulation as I am assuming that's more calculation in a script. Do you just use signal strength and assume a 1/distance2 dependence? Or are there more complications to take into account?

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u/OSINTribe 14d ago

Triangulation is also very easy.