A further development of the synchronous array method (SAM) as a medium access control scheme for large-scale ad hoc wireless networks is presented. Under SAM, all transmissions of data packets between adjacent nodes are synchronized on a frame-by-frame basis, and the spacing between concurrent cochannel transmissions of data packets is properly controlled. An opportunistic SAM (O-SAM) is presented which allows concurrent cochannel transmissions to be locally adaptive to channel gain variations. A distributed SAM (D-SAM) is discussed that schedules all concurrent cochannel transmissions in a distributed fashion. For networks of low mobility, the control overhead required by SAM can be made much smaller than the payload. By analysis and simulation, the intranetwork throughput of O-SAM and D-SAM is evaluated. The effects of traffic load and multiple antennas on the intranetwork throughput are studied. The throughput of ALOHA is also analyzed and compared with that of O-SAM and D-SAM. By a distance-weighted throughput, a comparison of long distance transmission versus short distance transmission is also presented. The study of D-SAM reveals an important insight into the MSH-DSCH protocol adopted in IEEE 802.16 standards.