It seems I am able to see broadcast traffic, a few ack packets and a handful of management type frames from all routers and iot type devices around me. I gleaned this by checking some MAC addresses, looking at be broadcast traffic, and checking against the devices I know, and extrapolating the best I can off the information available for the rest.

Why am I not even seeing traffic from my own laptop?

Using a usb interface on a kali VM, specifying only 2.4ghz band and another run specifying all bands.

When I use browser on the host machine on the internal network interface I can’t see that, but I’m also supposed to be seeing a whole lot more than that if I understand this correctly. Is it a VM configuration issue? What are the VM network settings in relationship to the host machine for this type of inquiry. Trying to get a better handle on the WiFi stuff to add on to a project I have come to enjoy quite a bit.