My conference tradition is to occupy myself with activities completely unrelated to the main topic. For instance, at DebConf I hacked on GNOME stuff, at GUADEC I hacked on Debian stuff, and at LinuxConf.eu I did very little. At PyCon UK, I've built the wireless-dev tree of Linux, and got the new b43 driver to run.
So, it works. It appears to have increased the transmission power of the card, and limits the bit rate properly, so should work at longer ranges without fiddling about. Having said that, I've been using it all of five minutes, so all kinds of bugs could be lurking around the corner.
I think I'll now take a look at Jackfield.