Airport Express Network Extending Issue

[davep18]

I currently have an Airport Extreme base station, AppleTV and an Airport Express.

We use the Airport Express and AppleTV to stream music to our master bedroom and the living room stereo. Airplay and the ipod\pad\phone remote app is great for having our entire music collection in the two rooms we spend the most time in, The kitchen houses the iMac where the music is stored.

Anyway, as the weather gets nice we enjoy sitting outside in our backyard. We get spotty reception at our patio table and no reception on our patio chairs from the network.

If i turn on the network extending feature of the Airport Express I find I get a good signal at both outdoor locations. The issue is that I lose the ability to connect to iMac with the remote app to control the music or access files stored on the network drives.

Is it possible to configure the Airport Express to allow me to extend the network while keeping the ability to access itunes, files, etc on the main computer?

I tried to search but I wasn't able to find this specific issue. I did find plenty of posts saying that it has a negative effect on network performance so if there is no solution that might not be a bad thing.

 

[laurenr]

If you want to extend the range of your wireless network, without losing any of the bandwidth, the best way is to create a "Roaming Network". This is done by hard-wiring the AEBX to the Airport Express via ethernet cable. A great work-around from using one cable: See my post here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/12509901/

The problem with extending a wireless network is that your signal degrades significantly. You can use the Powerline Adapters that I mentioned in the above post; they work extremely well. I have that setup in my home for the past couple of weeks and receive a strong signal from my Airport Express. You could install the Powerline Adapters in an outlet that is very close to your outdoor area. Here is a screenshot of my setup. Please note that each base station has their channels set as far apart as possible, and that the Express is set to Bridge Mode, while the main (AEBS), is set to "share a public IP Address. Otherwise, their settings are identical - same network, same password etc NOTE: they are BOTH set to "Create a Wireless Network" as opposed to "Extending/allowing to be extended". This is key.



Here is a link on the subject for the setup. The only thing I don't agree with is that their channel selection is set to "Automatic". This will not produce as efficient a result as setting them manually. When you do this, hold down the OPTION key while selecting channels; this will give you a greater variety of channel settings to choose from.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4260