Wireless mesh networks have increasingly become an object of interest in recent years as a strong alternative to purely wired infrastructure networks and purely mobile wireless networks. Given the challenges that have arisen in construction, deployment, and maintenance of wireless mesh networks, we outline a broad experimental research program in the area of medium-to-large scale community wireless networks. Our research is conducted in the context of an operational community network built in our test bed laboratory with continual plans to expand to the town of Troy, NY (up to hundreds of nodes in a 1-2 mile radius around RPI campus). Leveraging Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and Geographic Distributed Addressing (GDA), a novel and intuitive addressing assignment, geographic-based forwarding algorithms such as GPSR and TBF can be easily tested and traffic engineering theories implemented in a real-world environment. Our paper documents several design considerations and contributions in implementing community wireless networks including autoconfiguration, addressing structure, and antenna characteristics among other items, in addition to describing our novel test bed lab where RF effects of distances of thousands of meters can be simulated with server, antenna, and variable attenuator clusters.