So you want a car....

 Deceptive title but I'm about to talk about something 

soo technical that even armchair-bombasts falter.

Car analogy: you've decided, for whatever reason, to stick to gas-powered engines.
If I went into when they were made,

the history of pistons and cylinders, 

and some math thrown in, (to look impressive,) calculating power ratios,

Would you know which model you needed?

You'd still wonder which car was fastest or most economical.

Well, switch over to the extreme minutia surrounding wifi routers.
One is more expensive, because it has more features.

I wanna turn it off. "Mesh", "MLO", whatever.
Actually I don't care; some routers have to play little games,
Let this one play theirs.
But the hidden/ghost channel is just creepy.
A hidden channel broadcast by the router,
with a MAC address exactly one-away from the real channel.
(Explaining it is tiring)
This wasn't a problem before the firmware update.
Let other routers have their imaginary-friend channels, Mine was above that.
Until now.

Pointless

Insectoid invading Living room (You can name the room the bug is in I'm guessing, 

if you had many rooms and many bugs.
I go to prepare a room for you (he said, holding a can of RAID behind him) 

Digging myself a deeper grave.
"Big Brother" channel is still there, nothing to do but fritter
until THE END comes.

The bombast will reassure (and dig many minutia holes)

Maybe on Your router but not mine..

---

I don't want a "virtual private network" (I don't think), I don't want to add real life problems to theoretical benefits.
I DO (for the next 10 seconds) want a RADIUS validating server.
Maybe.
I mean, you have to trust the server and hope the hackers close by can't see you entering the agreed-upon password (which the server knows, and possibly gossips to anyone interested, nevermind!!)

back on topic:

No nodes here.

No recognized ones, anyway.

No (zero) nodes (it says) so WHY the hidden channel??

Messing around with my settings on a sweltering night ("sultry?") 
killed my keyboard and loses wifi every setting.
So anything I say I'll disclaim, tomorrow

"sultry," "Hot," whatever