I am new user, just loaded firmware onto WRT54G rev. 2 that I purchased used. Seems to work fine, thanks to everyone's hard work to provide this!

Where I live (Albuquerque) the local phone company offers DSL internet, and their wireless access point appears to default to Wifi Channel 1. When I click WiFi scan on my node, I see many signals on Channel 1. Channels 2, 3, and 4 are empty, and 5 and 6 have sometimes one signal each. Is my location unique, or do others see lots of signals on Channel 1?

Jim, AF5FH

Channel 1 has been the standards for some time now, it was a common channel used by hams prior to the mesh firmware.

On 802.11g networks in the US you have only 3 channels that don't overlap (1,6,11). Every other channel will cause at least some overlap so 1,6,11 have been common use.

802.11n uses double the "channel" sizes so to stay in the ham band and not overlap with any other channel you really only have channel 1@ 2402-2442 MHz).

This means to have the best chance of talking to another mesh node channel 1 is the sensible default.

Yes there are other devices in this area, but as hams we can run higher gain antennas (higher EIRP) to have an advantage on signals.