[SOLVED] How to Separate SSIDs on NetGear MK80S satellites

[njitgrad]

I just purchased a NetGear Nighthawk Mesh MK83 WiFi system.

My goal is to have a strong 2.4GHz signal throughout my house because my smart-devices (light bulbs, smart plugs, printers) are finicky about using the 5.0 Ghz band.

What I did was (on the MR80 router) set up a main SSID (which I'll call SSID_MAIN) and two customized SSIDs, a dedicated one for each of the two bands (SSID_24 & SSID_50).
I was able to see all three of these SSIDs show up on my phone as available WiFi networks.

I then accessed the setup pages of the two MS-80 satellites (by entering their IP addresses using my browser).
It appears that my two MS-80 satellites by default are only extending the SSID_MAIN network (which is not what I want).
It also appears that this value is not changeable.
What I want is SSID_24 extended (at the very least) on my satellites. When I attempt to change the SSID_MAIN value to SSID_24 it tells me that it is a duplicate SSID.

NetGear tech support has no clue what they are doing so I'm hoping someone here will.

Any advice would be appreciated!

 

[bill001g]

Don't use mesh systems is the best advice. If you need wifi extended you should use ethernet cable or something like moca or powerline networks to get the signal to the remote room and then use one of the satellite boxes as a AP rather than a repeater.

Mesh is all proprietary stuff there is not real standard for it. Many times you can not even mix and match units from the same manufacture, they only work with certain combinations of units.

How these work is different from vendor to vendor. It might be a restriction in their software you can not change

It is not uncommon for these devices to use the same SSID on both the 2.4 and 5 radio just because most people are extremely lazy and don't even want to have to deal with knowing anything about radio bands. They just hope their device connects to something.

If tech support can not help I would try the forums on the site if they have them. This is something that only users of that particular product are going to know.

In general things that do not need a lot of bandwidth should be able to connect to the main router directly even in a fairly big house. Maybe set the channel width on the 2.4 to 20mhz which should reduce the number of signals interfering.