laptop iwlwifi suddenly not working

[jim.cromie at gmail.com]

while fumbling to pause grub during boot,
I think I managed to disable the wifi.

its affecting distro kernel, and my own

booting with iwlwifi.debug=0xff on command line
shows me

iwl_pcie_apm_init Init card's basic functions
reporting RF_KILL (radio disabled)

It is reading that from somewhere, but where ?

F12 has radio-beacon icon,
pressing it causes WM to show Airplane mode,
so that appears to be the rfr-kill switch
dmesg -w shows me bluetooth going on and off,
but no try to do so on iwlwifi
are there other rf-switches ?

I also tried reboot, F2 - (uefi bios) reset factory, reboot
that obviously didnt help

FWIW this laptop exhibits pcie correctable errors,
I have pci=noaer in my boot line to ignore it.  too long ?
iirc, it was on same pcie port
removing it doesnt help now,