not quite
>Obviously it's not the sort of thing that many will admit to - even if they do it - but I've never heard of anyone re-programming the radio
Its actually not that hard to do and I did it to increase the power output on my 2.4ghz router from 49mW to 249mW or whatever. Of course all I did was get a binary blob someone else modified from the internet that the firmware would load at run time. I only did this for a few hours though because i quickly learned it gave me no advantage reception wise and as I found out later actually usually causes problems because the hardware doesn't handle it effectively (outside its design range).