To start with, all of this is reasonably custom, and some of it I'm simply not sharing at this time. Much of it, fortunately, is already fully open source, available to you, and already in Pentoo ;-)
This is going to be a multi part series, where I will introduce the tools, how they work, and some preliminary results. Nothing on this page should be deemed a hardware recommendation, this was me setting up my test rig for the first time in a while. The setup was physically entirely unfair, with wildly unmatched stock antennas and extremely close sources of noise. Don't buy anything because you think it performed well here, and if you do, it was your idea not mine.
Part One:
To start with, I like to test a lot of cards:
PHY Interface Driver Chipset
phy7 036ac 8812au Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8812AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2T2R DB WLAN Adapter
phy11 036ach 8812au Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8812AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2T2R DB WLAN Adapter
phy4 036acs 8812au Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
phy12 036eac 8812au Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8812AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac 2T2R DB WLAN Adapter
phy2 7822UAC 8812au Edimax Technology Co., Ltd
phy1 AC56 8812au ASUSTek Computer, Inc. USB-AC56 802.11a/b/g/n/ac [Realtek RTL8812AU]
phy6 awus1900 8814au Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8814AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac
phy9 edup 8812au Realtek Semiconductor Corp.
phy8 eub1200ac 8812au Senao EUB1200AC AC1200 DB [Realtek RTL8812AU]
phy0 intel7265 iwlwifi Intel Corporation Wireless 7265 (rev 61)
phy10 N600UBE rt2800usb Ralink Technology, Corp. RT3572
phy5 rlnknano 8812au Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8811AU 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WLAN Adapter
phy3 wdn4200 rt2800usb Ralink Technology, Corp. RT3573
I really like to name the cards to make this easier (as you can see), this is done by adding a line for each card to /etc/udev/rules.d/99-nicnames.rules Basically I plug each card in, and then bind it's mac to a useful name like this:
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:c0:ca:98:73:82", KERNEL=="wlan*", NAME="awus1900"
First, let's see if it monitors, and how well. For this, I am currently using "kismet_shootout.rb", a ruby plugin for kismet which can be found in the path on Pentoo systems. This tool is very simple, start kismet, and feed it all the wireless cards you want to test. Then you start kismet_shootout.rb and tell it which cards to test, and on which channel. For right now, the testing is fairly dumb, all the tool does it count packets seen, and whomever has the most packets is claimed to be "100%" and every other card then has a lower percent based on nothing but packet count. This gives you a reasonable estimate of how many packets are coming in, but not if they are valid or not, and nothing is checking if the packets really are the same. This tool only runs with "old" (stable) kismet right now, and that version of kismet doesn't have all the features the new kismet has, so this is as good as we have right now. If someone were to reimplement the tool for new kismet, they could take advantage of the dedup mechanism to get hashes for each packet and see for real if the packets seen by all cards are the same. Then the percentage could be based off the total number of unique packets and how many each card has seen, which would be slightly more useful.
INFO: Locking 036ac, 036ach, 036acs, 036eac, 7822UAC, AC56, awus1900, edup, eub1200ac, N600UBE, wdn4200 to channel 36
INFO: Waiting for sources to settle on channel...
INFO: Started at 2018-05-25 22:43:01 -0400
Name PPS Packets Percent Total Elpsd
N600UBE 30 40562918 93.50%
wdn4200 59 38580847 88.93%
036ac 37 42653025 98.32%
036ach 35 43381613 100.00%
036acs 29 37327675 86.04%
036eac 33 39970296 92.14%
7822UAC 33 40226936 92.73%
AC56 33 37751328 87.02%
awus1900 17 14268805 32.89%
edup 27 35987645 82.96%
eub1200a 28 36292940 83.66%
361 118h3m
INFO: Locking 036ac, 036ach, 036acs, 036eac, 7822UAC, AC56, awus1900, edup, eub1200ac, N600UBE, rlnknano, wdn4200 to channel 44
INFO: Waiting for sources to settle on channel...
INFO: Started at 2018-05-24 16:25:55 -0400
Name PPS Packets Percent Total Elpsd
rlnknano 0 111123 5.83%
wdn4200 0 1699403 89.19%
036ac 0 1905478 100.00%
036ach 4 1892517 99.32%
036acs 0 1709680 89.72%
036eac 1 1845425 96.85%
7822UAC 2 1878870 98.60%
AC56 1 1843208 96.73%
awus1900 4 105650 5.54%
edup 0 1615999 84.81%
eub1200a 0 1686462 88.51%
N600UBE 0 1864576 97.85%
12 30h15m
As you can plainly see, I like to run tests a long time. At least 4 days is best, because that makes me feel warm and fuzzy about the card not failing during an 8 hour hacking session. Driver instability is a thing, so is kernel instability, and during just these monitor mode tests I had one card completely fail and get put in the bin.
As you can also plainly see, the Alfa AWUS1900 (the only r8814au tested) performs like crap, despite looking like a 4 antenna monster. This is common with newer drivers and out of kernel modules (which this is both). The hardware is probably great, but the driver is so bad that it's nearly unusable. It's a bit hard to see due to the durations, but channel 44 is actually far more busy in my environment than 36, and the AWUS1900 was hot garbage on a busy channel, only doing slightly better on a very quiet channel.
The two best performers, Alfa 036ach and 036ac, traded spots a little big, but both maintained top performance on both 5GHz channels. The surprising break out was the Alfa 036eac, which did remarkably well despite having no antenna, outperforming the Alfa 036acs which has an external antenna.
Again, this isn't a hardware recommendation, and this isn't even a completely ideal way to test things. That said, I don't have an ideal way to test things, and so I'm doing what I can. Now that I've got some idea of which cards don't suck, I will be redoing this testing (and posting the results for all to see) and start making some actual recommendations. For now, enjoy kismet_shootout.rb, and if you want to reimplement it for new kismet you can find me both on kismet's discord as well as irc channel, and there will be glorious prizes for doing so :-)
-Zero_Chaos
