How to use Wireshark capture connection packets AND broadcast packets

[Jeffrey Tang]

I want to capture connection packets between BLE Master and Slave (this part is easy) but also capture any advertisement send out by slave at the same time.

Our BLE peripheral received data from Central device and forward out as broadcast packet

My steps:

1. Run Nordic Sniffer command line tool, select mac address
2. Launch WireShark, it starts capturing all broadcast packets,
3. Launch master device, connection has been established
4. WireShark only captures connection packets, no longer captures broadcast packets.

Different Steps:

1. Launch master device, connection has been established
2. Run command line tool, select mac address
3. Launch WireShark, it starts capturing ONLY broadcast packets.

It seems I could not get both broadcast packet and connection packets at the same time.

(I need to measure the time interval between receiving data from central and sending out broadcast packets)

[syntroniks]

Perhaps you could obtain a second sniffer dongle and run 2 instances of the sniffer, instructing one not to follow connection packets. This may or may not require two instances of wireshark.

[Jeffrey Tang]

two sniffers are not sync to each other, so still cannot figure out the interval between a packet A received on sniffer #1 and another packet B received on sniffer #2.

[Hung Bui]

@Jeffrey Tang: I also don't have any other suggestion than using 2 instance of the sniffer (with 2 dongle). Our sniffer currently when following a connection won't be able to capture other advertising packet. I don't know much about our plan in the future version of the sniffer.

But what you can do is to sync them using a advertising packet from the peripheral before it enters connection mode (Set time reference). Both 2 sniffers should be able to capture this packet. And then you can maybe merge the two traces together base on this relative timing.