Second WLAN Adapter, for…?

[therealwirednot]

Just coming back to WlAN Pi after the early NEO era. I see specific USB adapters are compatible/recommended for M4, but at the risk of sounding simple what would a second adapter be practically used for? And once the second adapter is connected, is it enabled and selectable in say Kismet or whatever (the nice UI side of life you all have provided) or is the second adapter only usable via CLI? Just wondering what can be done and how with a second adapter since they are listed. Thanks.

[jiribrejcha]

A good use case would be packet capture. With 2 adapters you can capture on 2 channels at the same time.

[therealwirednot]

Thanks, Jiri. Not seeing a lot on the how-to of a second adapter but I will look beyond the WLAN Pi docs.

[jiribrejcha]

This might help you: https://www.intuitibits.com/2021/02/02/multi-channel-captures-in-airtool-2/

[therealwirednot]

Thanks, yes am aware of AirTool. I guess my bigger point is that the WLAN Pi docs mention compatible second adapters, but then nothing else about them. Like… what you can and can’t do with it. My first thing I wanted to do was to add it to Grafana along with the first. Is that possible? Not sure. Is AirTool the goto for packet capture? If so, why not mention it in the doc? If there are other ways, at least point to them. That’s where I’m coming from, just some sense of the abilities and limits of a second adapter.

[joshschmelzle]

Another option might be using one adapter for Wi-Fi uplink (in the absence of an ethernet uplink) and the other for streaming packet capture to a remote destination.

[therealwirednot]

Indeed. That’s one thing I need to figure out, too.