Not every driver will support the feature.
I just tried with two of the cards that I have:
Qualcomm Atheros AR5212/AR5213 Wireless Network Adapter This one supports survey dump and here are the results Survey data from wlan1 frequency: 2412 MHz noise: -98 dBm channel active time: 51514 ms channel busy time: 6096 ms channel receive time: 5688 ms channel transmit time: 0 ms
Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter Doesn't return anything.
iw survey dump -- will register the handler method with NL; however it is up to the underlying driver support for survey dump.