is there any wifi / Bluetooth combo cards that work at all? or just stick to a wifi card and forget about BT.
cheers
Intel cards tend to need firmware blob first, in order to operate at all. Which you'd have to initially download from internet using some other type of connection.
Old Atheros cards tend to work OTB.
Atheros AR9280 ("abgn" card) for pure WiFi. 2-streams, nothing really special. Advantages: Supported by pretty much any operating system (Free/Net/OpenBSD, DragonFly, OpenIndiana, Linux). It's firmware is still reprogrammable (unlock 5GHz hostAP functionality, modify MAC address etc, mess with output power)
Atheros AR9285 ("bgn" card), WiFi+BT, disadvantage - 1-stream chip, advantage: like one above, supported by virtually all the OS'es you might want to play around with.
Atheros AR9462 ("abgn"+BT) when you want Bluetooth as well. (300Mbit tops, 2-streams)
Atheros AR9380 ("abgn"), 3-streams, 450Mbits max card. No integrated BT
Intel 5100 - "abgn", needs firmware blob for operation, somewhat unstable on FreeBSD while using 5GHz "n" ("an") (strictly my experience ofc), no BT AFAIK.
All are mPCIe cards but that would be an non-issue if you used M2/mPCIe adapter card. Look @eBay for these.