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How can I check to see if my (rooted) android device has a wireless card that supports either monitor mode or promiscuous mode?

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Unfortunately you need root to be able to do that, despite you saying it, but thought it would be useful to leave that in here for others :)

All modern wireless cards chipsets would may have that feature to be able to sniff/monitor, but as Matthew Read pointed out in the comments below, its a grey area in terms of driver support.

When you issue the binary command ifconfig there's a 'promisc' switch to tell it to go into promiscuous mode to enable monitoring/sniffing.

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I'm not sure all modern chipsets have that feature, I recall some XDA discussions about phones that did not (though I can't remember which). There's also frequently no driver support for it in Android. – Matthew Read♦ Jun 27 '12 at 22:05
Top off my head, there's Atheros, Broadcom, they are the main two used.. in fact, simple check to see if it is supported - wifi sniffer app for android (play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vadim.ofer.sniffer) that will confirm promiscuous mode, and shark for root (play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=lv.n3o.shark) – t0mm13b Jun 27 '12 at 22:15
@MatthewRead You are 100% correct on driver support, especially Atheros, its extremely sketchy to say the least :) And purported claims of sources are well and truly scattered about but broken or don't build at all :) – t0mm13b Jun 27 '12 at 22:16
I'll edit my answer accordingly :) – t0mm13b Jun 27 '12 at 22:18

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