Getting the MAC address of your Wi-Fi unit/card

Many Pocket PC users would like to know how the MAC address of their built-in or add-on Wi-Fi module/card can be obtained. For example, in the last two days, there have been two user requests over at microsoft.public.pocketpc and microsoft.public.pocketpc.wireless asking this.

First, it's not possible from inside Settings/ Connections/ Network Cards (Settings/ Connections/ Connections/ Advanced/ Network Card under WM2003 and Settings/ Connections/ Network Adapters under PPC2k/PPC2k2). The address you can see in IP address when the Wi-Fi unit is active but it's not connected is not the MAC address (an example of that can be seen here).

To get the MAC address of your network card (I mean both the built-in one and add-on ones) is, fortunately, pretty simple.

If you'd prefer built-in solutions, you may (but won't necessarily) be able to find the MAC address. If your Pocket PC has a non-standard Wi-Fi setter/controller applet (as has been already emphasized, the standard, built-in Network Cards won't suffice), it will most probably display the address. Three of my four Wi-Fi enabled Pocket PC's (the Dell Axim x51, the HTC Wizard and the SanDisk Connect Plus CF Wi-Fi card when used in a pre-WM2003 device) has this feature. Example screenshots follow:

x51v
Wizard
SanDisk card in PPC2k2 (that is, pre-WM2003) iPAQ h3660

With Pocket PC devices that don't have proprietary network setter applets by default, the situation isn't that simple. Some of them (for example, the iPAQ hx4700 – see the HP Asset Viewer in Settings/System) have enhanced asset viewers / information pages, but this is pretty rare, even under WM5. None of my (several) Pocket PC's have any kind of enhanced system info applets with MAC display.

This means you may run into situations where you will need to turn to third-party solutions. This is the case with for example Pocket Loox 720, which doesn't have a detailed Wi-Fi client. The same stands for external Wi-Fi cards and WM2003+ devices, if the cards don't use/install any detailed controller applet on the Pocket PC. (This is the case of, say, the SanDisk Connect Plus CF Wi-Fi card – it only installs a decent Wi-Fi client on Pocket PC 2002 devices, where there's no built-in Wireless support in the operating system.)

The solution is, then, the free vxIPConfig (current, tested version: 0.9.6). With them, you can get the MAC address of any Pocket PC's. Two example screenshots showing this on my Pocket Loox 720 and iPAQ 2210 + SanDisk Connect Plus CF Wi-Fi card combo.

Note that vxUtil, probably the best, highly recommended networking utility from the same developer, doesn't display the MAC address.

Finally, if you have (administrative) access to a wireless router/access point the Pocket PC is trying to connect to, you can also use it to get the MAC address of the client.