Devices don’t connect to the nearest satellite

30 feet is recommended in between RBR and RBS to begin with depending upon building materials when wirelessly connected. 

What channels are you using? Auto? Try setting manual channel 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4Ghz and any unused channel on 5Ghz.
Any Wifi Neighbors near by? If so, how many?

Try enabling Beamforming and MIMO(MIMO may or maynot be needed) and WMM. Under Advanced Tab/Advanced Settings/Wireless Settings. You can turn down the power output of the RBR to see if this helps any. 
.

Try disabling the following and see:
Armor, Circle, Daisy Chain, Fast Roaming, IPv6 and Set 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only. Set Short preamble instead of Long preamble modes. Save settings and reboot the router and satellite(s).

Try a factory reset and setup from scratch to see if this changes the Daisy Chain behavior. 

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Throttling-Devices-RBK53/m-p/1858561/highlight/true#M81925
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Orbi-Satellite-Drop-Connection-time-to-time/m-p/1890341/highlight/true#M88026

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Alixer wrote:

I appologize if this has already been answered but I have spent a lot of time on the forums now and each topic just ends up being a rabbit hole.

 

First, my setup. I am running a RBR50 with one indoor satellite and one outdoor satellite. My home is about 3700sf and the the satellites are about 30-40' away from the main router. I'm running in router mode with v2.5.1.8. I am in a star formation but the Daisy chain option is enabled as this option seems to be reversed (and I've seen others in this forum saying the same). If I disable this option then the satellites move into a daisy chain as far as I can tell, which is not the configuration I want and one of the satellites cannot connect.

 

So now my problem. I have 3 devices in particular that are sitting near my satellite and yet they connect to the main router. 2 of the devices are literally 1 foot away from the satellite and 30'-40' away from the router and yet they still connect to the router. The 3rd devices is 10' away from the satellite and 40'-50' away from the main router. I really don't care which device they connect to as long as they work. But this 3rd device does not have a reliable connection. It is an echo dot and some times it struggles to connect and other times it does not. But always it shows as connected to the main router (according to the Orbi app) with a weak connection. Oddly I have a SkyBell door bell in the same vincinity that connects to the satellite as expected on the 2.4ghz channel so I know some devices connect. Also there is an Apple TV connected to that satellite on the 5ghz channel.

 

I have Beamforming disabled. I tried enabling it but then I started getting dropped connections on devices I care about a lot more than that echo. I turned on MIMO (or what ever that acronym is) but then my entire network was hosed. I tried resetting the network connection on the Echo as well but that didn't help. 

 

Any other ideas would be much appreciated. Thank you

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