nope, that's not a MAC address, if i switch interfaces to wired ethernet (eth0), i see the MAC addresses of the windows computer i use PuTTY from and the Linux box with the wireless.pl app on it perfectly flying by.
Also, I don't really care about the payload, i just need the MAC addresses.
I can write another thread for channel hopping later using iwconfig or a Perl module to iwconfig later. I just want to make sure i can get MACs from the same data i see the plain text ESSID's.

My Net::Pcap is up to date: Net::Pcap is up to date (0.16). and i don't see a module for NetPacket for 802.11, but i do see a section in the Net::Pcap file on the CPAN site that says:
:datalink exports the data link types macros:
"DLT_IEEE802_11 - IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN"

as an exporter tag. Does that mean I need to do: "use Exporter;" and "export" them? that part confused me a bit, heh. Thanks again, man :)