Post #5 on this thread was not accurate information and was posted by another team member who didn't understand the gist of this thread. This is all done in jest so should be considered a "joke"
Just to clarify-this was a project embarked on for fun, not for actual use in the competition or in any real-world applications.
This router has provided poor performance overall in our testing (which happens primarily outdoors) and as it's worth only $29.99 we decided to embark on some experimenting with DD-WRT
We increased the Tx Power which did improve ping times but reliability is not perfect. As we are not using this router for any actual applications (replaced with a couple of WRT54G's, completely stock, which work very well) FCC violations shouldn't be relevant and we'll make sure to keep this thing out of production environments.
I hope somebody got a few chuckles out of this

Perhaps we should have waited until April Fools!
Good luck at your competitions everyone!