Suggestions for Hardware/driver WIFI combo that allows low level signal access

[Baruch Siach]

Hi Micha,

On Tue, Jul 02, 2013 at 12:49:19PM -0400, Micha Feigin wrote:
> I'm was wondering if anyone here can recommend a hardware / driver
> combo for WIFI that allows access to the low level signal. I'm
> looking to do some non-communication related research (uni stuff)
> that requires sending custom signals over WIFI frequencies (to avoid
> FCC limitations), and I was hoping that there is some existing
> hardware that I can hack at the driver level instead of building
> complex hardware (which I have, but getting a high enough accuracy
> starts getting pretty expensive).
> 
> I'm not looking to bypass power/frequency limitations, just to send
> custom signals over one of the WIFI channels.

A Linux WiFi driver is meant to give you access to a network, not to let you 
control the radio signal used to send network packets. Even if a WiFi hardware 
that allows tweaking the radio signals did exist, I doubt a standard driver 
would expose these capabilities to the user.

You may, however, have some luck with this: 
https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware. This is the source code of the 
firmware running "inside" the WiFi hardware of some Atheros (now Qualcomm) 
products. You'll have to tweak the firmware code to expose the desired 
capabilities to the host machine. Then, you need to teach the kernel driver 
(ath9k) how to use these capabilities.

I hope this helps.

baruch

-- 
     http://baruch.siach.name/blog/                  ~. .~   Tk Open Systems
=}------------------------------------------------ooO--U--Ooo------------{=
   - baruch at tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -