I've got a new laptop which appears to default to having the radio 
transmitter off. I get the following errors:
wpi0: timeout waiting for thermal sensors calibration
wpi0: fatal firmware error

which a bit of research[1] suggests is down to the transmitter being off. 
There is button which is meant to switch it on, but has no effect. Out of 
interest, I tried Ubuntu which did report that the transmitter was off at 
boot time. With Ubuntu, when I pressed the wireless button it turned on 
the transmitter (and enabled the interface as eth1 appeared). When I 
pressed the button again, the kernel flagged that the transmitter was off. 
NetBSD should be doing the same (line 1590 in if_wpi.c), but clearly isn't 
getting the notification (this is probably generally true - when I 
inadvertently switched off the transmitter on a different laptop, I was 
unable to switch it back on).

I'm using very current netbsd-4 with version 2.14.4 of the firmware.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/misc@openbsd.org/msg45567.html

-- 
Stephen