The “airodump” tool, part of the aircrack wireless analysis suite, is like “tcpdump”, except that it can perform channel hopping. Since channel hopping is a “lossy” way to do wireless sniffing (you’re only listening on each channel for a few hundred milliseconds before moving on to the next channel), it doesn’t make sense to listen to channels that you know will contain no traffic. However, there was no way to specify a range of channels. airodump would either listen on 1 channel or hop across all channels.
I wrote a patch to allow for a comma-separated list of channels to be specified. Now I can tell airodump to spend all of its hopping time on 6, 11, and 1, for example:
airodump ath0 /tmp/ath0-logs 6,11,1
UPDATE: Here’s a patch that does that same for aircrack-ng.
© 2006 – 2010, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.