Would like to get WIFI to my garage. Can I add pod to different ssid?

[emptyorchestra]

Ok I don't know if this will work or not, but theoretically it should.  I am trying to extend the wifi coverage of my gateway modem to my garage which is a fair distance from the house so I decided to get 3 of the shaw bluecurve pods.

I plugged one into the closest point of the house to the garage, set it up as instructed, and then plugged another one into the garage and got the gateway modem to recognize it.  But the connection must to at the max range because the pods keep disconnecting and I can only get up to 50MB per second, 

So I got a nighthawk r8000 router and changed the SSID to the same name as the bluecurve gateway and that improved things about 50% of the time, but the other 50% the signal would drop out.  After further investigation with a wifi analysing software, I found out that half the time, the blue curve pods were connecting to each other directly instead of connecting thru the router which is what I intended.

So i changed the id of the nighthawk router, and plugged it into a pod using a cat 6 ethernet cable.  When I use my phone to connect to the nighthawk router it recognizes the shaw gateway modem, and the two set up pods, so I figured all i'd have to do is reset the second pod in the garage to recognize the 'new' connection.  so I delete that pod and try to set it up connected to the nighthawk, but it wants to start at the beginning like it was a brand new setup/install.

I've tried connecting directly to the nighthawk router from the garage with my Galaxy S5 neo, and it connects a little better.  Theoretically the nighthawk router  should be able to extend the range of the network so that the pod in the garage doesn't have to 'reach' as far to connect but I'm at a loss as how to ensure it is always connecting thru the nighthawk router, instead of connecting directly to the gateway router..   I feel like i'm missing something really obvious.   Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

-James

[mdk]

> I'm at a loss as how to ensure it is always connecting thru the nighthawk router, instead of connecting directly to the gateway router.

Login to the web-server on each router, to discover which devices are connected to that router.

> Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

How far apart is the Gateway router from the Nighthawk router? If the answer is "essentially nothing", then the WiFi coverage "clouds" for each device will be approximately identical, i.e., you are gaining nothing by overlaying the Nighthawk's "cloud" over the Gateway's "cloud".

[Mendel]

Just to ask a novice question: did you set bridge mode to "enable"?. I think this is the usual method to use a third-party wifi router.

This essentially makes your gateway modem/router JUST a modem. Then you plug your wifi router in, and it handles everything downstream.

This is a Shaw Blue Curve XB6 interface, not sure if it's similar: