Hey guys, long time lurker here!

I've been trying to get my Alfa 036ACH to play nice with Kali 2020.4 for over a week now. Tried a dozen of things and spend upwards of 35+ hours getting it to work. Some drivers did work, but I wasn't able to set the network card into monitoring mode. I also found one driver which seemed to work (iwconfig reported mode managed -> mode monitor) but for some reason my wireless testing tools didn't work. I've tried this on my own network and to check security of client networks I am responsible for, in the software it says it's doing things like sending a deauth to certain mac addresses, but it does not seem to send them at all.

I remember in a much older version of Kali that it seemed to work nicely!


Right now I am pretty lost on how to proceed. From reading A LOT of topics here and on other places, it seems that something has changed when newer Linux kernels were introduced. For some reason it broke packet injection/monitor mode for many.

I am so exhausted from trying so many things and I have to really discipline myself to not smash my head against the wall..

I've tried several versions of Kali so far, but I would like to use the most recent one with kernel 5.9.0-kali5-amd64. From reading many forums, it seems that some of the "recent" drivers for the 036ACH don't play nice with supporting certain packets/modes necessary for wifi pen testing.

I would be so grateful for any guidance beyond the usual "upgrade the distro" or install the realtek-rtl88xx-au-dkms driver. It seems many people; also with other Alfa devices have issues on the latest version of Kali, I've seen the threads here, but not sure what is relevant for me and what is not.

Any pointers to get my setup working is highly appreciated! thanks a lot