• Airpcap Software Distribution Group

If you just want to monitor the other wireless clients, you don't need a particular adapter as any adapter can sniff the wireless signals over the air. However, if you want to inject specially crafted packets (such as WEP cracking), you need to have an adapter that can support injection. If you want to test your wireless adapter if it supports injection or not, you can use the aireplay-ng which is part of the aircrack-ng suite of tools.

Airpcap Software Distribution Group

The command to test a basic injection is: aireplay-ng -9 wlan0Microsoft Windows has only a single Adapter that supports raw packet injection which is the Airpcap adapter. If you plan to use a Linux distribution such as BackTrack or Kali, any modern wireless adapter is capable of injecting raw packets.You can find further details about the injection test procedure at. You cannot use VMWare or any other virtualized environment since it will mount the wireless adapter as Ethernet device which can't sniff or inject into the wireless network. Do i need to have a Airpcap adapter to monitor all the packets from my router or is there any alternative?For Wireshark, or any other application that uses WinPcap to capture traffic, you need an AirPcap adapter.For, you won't need (and can't use) an AirPcap adapter; however, you will need Windows Vista or later, and an adapter that supports 'Native Wi-Fi' (I don't know how to determine whether your laptop's adapter does other than downloading Network Monitor and installing it and trying it). Some vendors of competing network analyzers that provide their own drivers for Wi-Fi adapters say that 'Native Wi-Fi', for capturing in 'monitor mode', doesn't work very well for some adapters.