How do I activate SNMP on Airport base stations

Using Mountain Lion and the Airport utility I can't find a way to activate SNMP on any of the Airport base stations I have. Even the old ones which were configured to use it don't have the option anymore.

It is as if the options disappeared recently. What is the solution to enable SNMP?

SNMP appears to be on by default. I bought a new Airport Express recently (the white Apple TV looking version), and just ran this command against it: snmpwalk -v 2c -c public -O e 10.0.1.1 and it returned the huge list of OIDs/values I would have expected.

You are correct that the community cannot be changed with the 6.* version of the AirPort Utility app, but 5.6.1 is still compatible even with Mountain Lion. One Mr. Frank Tisellano created an Automator Workflow to install 5.6.1. After installing this, you'll have both versions of the Airport Utility side-by-side. Using 5.6.1 will allow you to customize the community string, and the other advanced options that were lost in version 6.

See this answer to install Airport Utility 5.6 on Mountain Lion.

In El Capitan, I was unable to get 5.6 running. It showed an "application damaged" icon, and trying to open it resulted in a message "You can’t use this version of the application “AirPort Utility 5.6” with this version of OS X."

However, I did get this to work. I have an OS X Leopard Server install running in Parallels v11, and was able to get 5.6 running readily on the older OS. I put the Parallels network into "bridge" mode to the host system's Wifi.

And it worked! Airport Utility 5.6 was able to see my Airport Extreme and adjust SNMP settings.