I am working between a few radio clubs and we have been testing nodes and trying to gin up some interest.  I have some questions.

Under the old firmware we used alpha omnis tested a 4.3 mile shot in hilly treed terrain and had  good connectivity. 

With the new firmware our testing has not gone well.  We used google earth and splat to check some spots between two radio clubs over water.  Line of sight in good weather.  The 4 mile station would get an occasional ip address and the three mile station got the ip address of the node we were trying to get into but could not see the node name.

Up close and personal I could see the node name, that is next to the node.  Why cant we see the node name from a distance?  We used windows and linux machines

I played with the distance settings and found that auto is no better than most other settings.  If the distance to the furthest node is 4 miles the the distance setting would be 6500?

Went back to the same site where I had a decent signal but no node name under the same weather conditions and got only a few hits from the distant nodes.  Are some ducting issues in play?

We plan to do more testing and we have some interest but we need to work out the distance issue.  Any thoughts?

We went out and retested the nodes and found that the node we were aiming at had a faulty transmitter.  It was transmitting intermittently.  After a day of successful testing we feel much better.  Nodes can and do go bad.  We found that out the hard way.

Now comes the hard part...networking.