Tactical wireless networks are used in cases where standard telecommunication networks are unavailable or unusable, e.g. disaster relief operations. We fully model the design of these tactical networks as a nested optimization problem with a physically-modeled signal and three elementary data traffic scenarios. Specifically, we consider the problem for tree networks with two channels, four possible frequencies and multi-beam antennas of 24 beams. We propose a multi-level algorithm that uses 1) a Tabu Beam Search for the topology design, 2) a simple geometrical heuristic for the antenna configuration and 3) exact methods, heuristics, meta-heuristics and bounding procedures for the network configuration. Synthetic experiments suggest that our method finds very good networks and that it significantly outperforms a previous algorithm.