dan wells

My supervisors and myself have decided that I’ve been doing too much technical work lately and that I must start my Masters thesis write up. I could not agree more.

I have constructed my thesis layout using LaTeX, nicely laid out into seperate files for each chapter, the bibliography, appendices and the glossary.

Currently I’m working on my Chapter 2, which is the Related Work or the Literature Survey. It’s a good start and I’m slowly getting back into writing again. Things are going faster after each consecutive day that I work on it.

Watch this space, but Chapter 2 is presently sitting at 3338 words.

Last year I completed my BSc Honours in Computer Science. My project was about discovering the locations of 2.4 GHz transceivers (like Wi-Fi devices) using multiple spectrum analysers (and the method of trilateration). The project was aptly titled IEEE 802.11 Signal Source Mapping using Low Cost Spectrum Analysers.

The project was rather successful and I developed a proof of concept application to demonstrate its uses. A small pamphlet (70 page thesis) was written discussing the finer points of the project :) For more details on the project see my honours research website.

The application produced some interesting results, and some really interesting signal maps. Each circle is displaying data from the application interfaced to the spectrum analyser, the circle radius is an estimate at how far a received signal has been transmitted from. Devices can be discovered by noting where the overlapping signals intersect.