Thanks to albert for pointing me towards wavemon, a cool program.
However it didn't quite work on my Zipit, so I got the sources and did a bit of hacking. 
 I fixed several things, optimized a few things for the Zipit screen, and changed the operation a bit so that the Access points screen works.
 I found that the original code hasn't been developed in a while, but there has been a bit of work done by some folks at debian.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/wavemon/
http://www.janmorgenstern.de/projects-software.html
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/wavemon

The patch here is specifically for the Zipit, it makes a few assumptions about the version of wireless extensions, and is tuned for a 320 x 240 screen. Howver some of the fixes may be usefull for other architectures.

Some of the things I changed:

1) dont use function keys for the commands.
2) shorten lines in the info screen to fit in 320 x 240.
3) simplify the level histogram screen.
4) make the access points screen work by using SIOCGIWSCAN (some what brute force, by using parts of iwlib.c of wireless tools ver 28).
5) added a sample .wavemonrc file, I didn't get around to changing the builtin defaults. it's called wavemonrc and needs to be put in /root as .wavemonrc.
6) redid the scan timing as the Zipit's wifi chip/driver combo takes 2-3 (maybe more) seconds to complete a scan, and wavemon was trying to do one much more often than that. This seems to have mostly cleared up a problem with lost esc chars that plagued the older versions, as well as reducing cpu useage to under 100%.
7) added essid and link quality to the access point screen, so more accesspoints can fit.
8) added the fixes found in the debian wavemon-0.4.0b-8 diffs.
9) re-did the memu line/window to fit and use #'s instead of F#'s.

Note: since the Zipit wifi chipset/driver takes a while to do a scan, the Zipit may not respond to keypresses while that is going on. so don't be surprised if you have to hit the command keys (1 2 3 4 5) more than once, or it takes a couple of seconds to respond. Also the Zipit disconnects from it's associated access point when scanning, so things may get wierd if you are using NFS. Lastly, the Zipit has to be associated for the numbers in the Interface window of the info screen, or level histogram to mean anything. The access point list works however.

 have fun, ...ken...