Rans6Andrew (excellent choice of aircraft if your name is reflective of that by the way
)
I'm assuming you've seen the network manager icon at the top right of the window? If you've clicked on it, it will show you the wireless networks it can access. If network manager is doing it's job you shouldn't need to configure the wireless by hand.
If you have clicked on network manager & it tells you it can't find any networks then the wireless drivers aren't working correctly, but that would be unusual as Ubuntu 9.10 has a wide variety of wireless support.
Anyway, first question. Can Network Manager find the wireless connection at all?