Some more info: 1. I checked the PSU with it plugged into a 5-ohm dummy load, and into the Soekris. With the dummy load, the voltage fell to 11.5 volts -- pretty crappy regulation, but still well within the Soekris' specs. The dummy load is drawing over 2A at that voltage.
In the Soekris, the PSU puts out right at 12V. I even put a scope on it to check for ripple, but it was minimal. 2. The SparkLAN ral card gets a little warm while running, but not bad. I switched it to the miniPCI slot with no discernable (to the back of my hand) difference in temperature, though what effect it had on the Soekris I don't know. Didn't seem to affect anything, though, at least for the two days I ran it that way. I moved it back to the PCI carrier card, which is completely passive as I expected. 3. I started having difficulty getting my Windows 7 laptop to connect at all. It would associate, but not get an IP, and dhcpd on the Soekris saw/logged nothing. I thought back to the anomaly I saw in the ifconfig output, where it said the card was in "11a" mode but operating on channel 11, in the 2.4 GHz band (a "g" channel). After reading the ral man page I tried forcing it to "11g" mode with a "mode 11g" in the hostname.ral0; after I did that, the laptop connected fine. Why it worked before in that "disjoint" mode I don't know. Maybe that was the problem all along; I'll follow up in a few days to help future Googlers. [Side note: I tried using "11a" mode, but the transmit power appears to be very weak with this card on a couple of different 11a channels I tried, at least relative to an access point I used to have. It's a disappointment, since being able to use the uncluttered 5 GHz band is one reason I bought this dual-band card.] I'll wrap this up with a final shout out to the OpenBSD devs. I had to fix a relative's Dell Mini 9 netbook running Ubuntu over the last few days, and had to get dirty at the command line because all of Ubuntu's "user-friendliness" couldn't make up for Dell's poor choice of vendors for some of its hardware. All the myriad configuration files, ifconfig/iwconfig/wpa_supplicant BS, and flakiness of the Mini's Broadcom wifi card and its proprietary driver made OpenBSD's simple, ifconfig-does-everything approach shine all the more brightly.
