General BeOS guru for all things network driver related - and if you read the commit logs for Haiku* - PCMCIA too - Patrick Lafarguette, has today published updates to his Intel 2200 and Ralink wireless drivers with monitor mode ("RFMON" under Linux) support, as well as a new application - BeNetworkCapture. This app captures 802.11 frames, and does what he describes as basic analysis.

The ability to capture packets has a number of uses - most notably passive wireless scanning, although I'm sure you can think of a few more if you've got devious minds... Very usefully, and very cool-ly, the captures frames can be saved in the standard pcap format, which lets you play around with them using Ethereal, or other tools.

I have an at least theorethically supported card here, so will give this a play with later on, if possible

*More on this later.