Looking for a better ping or other options

[ryokimball]

Hello!
I want to triangulate wireless APs. The first idea is to simply find the speed of the radio signal, ping from two separate locations (either with two wireless devices or by moving a singular wireless device and pinging twice), and calculate the position. However, I have no idea how to get as detailed speed in ping I need, plus I would need to be connected to the network.
Are there any suggestions to overcoming this? A 'faster ping' would be nice, or any other triangulation solutions (google turns nothing bar perhaps some commercial suff; I ain't paying for it....)

[bigtomrodney]

There are some pretty funky options in ping (if you get over the connection issue). A flood ping perhaps, or use the preload option so that it will send a fixed amount of packets without waiting for reply. The latter requires root privilege, possibly the former too.

On the notion of a faster ping...I know in Windows it generally reports <1ms as the fastest ping but check out my output on Ubuntu

64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.024 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.020 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.021 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.020 ms
64 bytes from localhost (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=0.020 ms

That's right down to microseconds

Generally speaking wardrivers use this very technique. I don't have an indepth knowledge but this may help -

http://www.wardrive.net/wardriving/faq

[ryokimball]

Ah! I meant to be more specific on the pings... I wanted more detailed speed rather than a faster pinging rate.
You got this, but I thought I'd make it more abundantly clear.

[ryokimball]

Reading on this "wardriving" stuff... very nice! It's not quite what I'm looking for (it seems this is mostly GPS to fix the location, where I want to just use my wireless adapter[s] and calculate triangles myself), but this is still cool stuff myself, perhaps something to use when hardware funds develop. Thanks!!