problems with ath0 "no carrier" on freebsd-current

Hello,

I bought some Wistron CM9 A/B/G mPCI cards from wisp-router.com before 
Christmas because they were on sale for around $50 a piece and rumored to 
work with madwifi and/or ath driver on BSD.  The specs seem like they should 
work:

http://www.wisp-router.com/product_info.php?cPath=35_51&products_id=332

I've tried the card with both Gentoo Linux running 2.6.10 from kernel.org 
and latest madwifi from CVS.  The card shows up fine and the various 
ifconfig/iwconfig commands all work as expected but the card will never 
associate with an AP or if acting as an AP clients can't connect with it 
(simplest case, no encryption/security etc.).  FWIW, the symptoms present 
identically to the countrycode problem discussed on madwifi-users the last 
week in December - although I tried passing various country codes into the 
module still with no joy (perhaps I never passed the right value ).

Those problems, the fact that madwifi-users won't let people who use MSN as 
their ISP post, and general frustration with Gentoo led me to try freebsd 
which I must confess I like alot better for its simplicity and thorough 
documentation.  I updated from 5.3STABLE to current because ultimately I 
want WPA support (even though now I'm just trying to get it working without 
any security) and was hopeful things would just work.  However, they didn't.

Here is what I get from "dmesg | grep ath0":

ath0: <Atheros 5212> mem 0xdf000000-0xdf00ffff irq 10 at device 10.0 on pci2
ath0: Ethernet address: 00:0b:6b:34:1b:23
ath0: mac 5.9 phy 4.3 radio 3.6

Note that the channel information doesn't show up.  FWIW, it did show up 
properly for all three modes with madwifi.

Similarly, all the ifconfig commands seem to work, but no matter what I do, 
status on the interface always shows "no carrier".

A few final things to note:

1.  The mPCI card is installed in a mPCI to PCI adapter/bridge shown here:

http://www.wisp-router.com/product_info.php?cPath=38&products_id=167

2.  I don't think this is a random hardware problem, because the card does 
work fine when I put it in my laptop which runs Windows XP (I just let it 
pick the generic Atheros driver from Windows Update).

3.  Apparently this card is well supported by Star-OS and Microtik - but 
I've read that they are just tweaked versions of madwifi/no?

Thoughts/pointers on how to proceed from here?

Thanks,  Jeff