Well things are doing pretty well. I have a cheap hardware platform and extra features I hadn't considered before, for example, base station can replay messages to connected PC.
Extra Things
Dynamic Routing
I have the beginnings of fully adaptive routing based on AODV protocol; this needs to be completed. In practice static source routing seems to work pretty well.
Very Very Cheap Hardware Platform
I have a few ideas to halve the cost of my hardware yet again but this will involve custom hardware design so I'm not sure it is worth it.