1) There are a few things you can do to mitigate frequency contention with multiple nodes adjacent to each other. As long as the traffic demand does not exceed the limitation imposed by these nodes competing with each other, it will work: 1a) there are sites which sell metal shielding between antennas; 1b) use different bands with a 2.4ghz next to a 5ghz antenna; 1c) use different channels on same band.
2) I recommend that you check out http://commotionwireless.net/, if the intent is to stay part 15 and build a local "community" mesh with non-hams. These guys and the firmware are built exactly for this purpose. I currently have one of these commotion community nodes joined as a node on my bbhn mesh for evaluation. Using a bbhn node for a part 15 usage would be problematic. Don't want to say that you can't legally do so, just that it raises confusion that can be avoided.
3) I've not looked into the Mac issue, but sounds like a domain search path problem on the Mac. Try adding "local.mesh" to the domain search path?
Joe AE6XE |