First off, use Atheros wifi chipsets because their drivers are open source and can be modified. A cantenna is cheap and can easily bridge around 2-5km if there

First off, use Atheros wifi chipsets because their drivers are open source and can be modified. A cantenna is cheap and can easily bridge around 2-5km if there's not much noise on the spectrum. If you want to create a meshnet, you should look for OpenWRT compatible hardware in terms of routers and clients. There's lots of ralink or RTL based USB wifi dongles that also have support for gnuradio so you could also switch frequency bandwidths if they got a tuner on them. An easy and stealthy low-bandwidth meshnet can easily be created with old DVB-T usb sticks because the RTLSDR allows flexible channel hopping and key rotations, if necessary. There's also lots of RTLSDR projects that use the LoRa spectrums, and they might work if you are looking for a text based communications network. That's why I mentioned it. There's also the OsmocomBB project which also has support for RTLSDR in case you want to create your own DIY GSM network with IMSI catchers and the like :) Wi-Fi usually has the problem that the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies are overloaded with noise, so they are hard to tweak into a long range mesh network. [1] https://osmocom.org/projects/rtl-sdr/wiki https://osmocom.org/projects/rtl-sdr/wiki [2] https://openwrt.org/toh/buyerguide https://openwrt.org/toh/buyerguide