R9000 DROPPING WIFI EVERY 15-20 MINS

switched brands and the Asus router took me a whole 15 mins to set up and has been working flawlessly. Bonus was it was half the price for 1 router and 1 router/mesh.

So it has been almost 2 weeks since I decided to quit messing with the netgear router and replaced with a mesh set up from Asus https://amzn.to/2IRFzkY. They are not as fancy but omg, not a single dropped signal since I swithced over. IMO I would rather have relyability over speed, still getting 800-900 mbps on LAN and 100mbps on 2.4 @~200 mbps on 5G. Best switch I have made an it was only half to cost lol... Good bye netgear you just lost a 15 year customer

This is the direction I am headed in as I have tried to work with Netgear support and their engineering team.  This Product is a failure and product support team is a failure as well.  Not addressing customer concerns around product reliability at this price point is a leadership problem.  I will be advocating out to every forum I can not buy these products until Netgear gets their act together! 

This is my second R9000 as the first ended up having a power issue whereas it would turn on but nobody home.  It was returned and replaced. I too have been having random signal loss and have, I believe, finally solved this problem.

The solution is of course quite simple.. as others had disabled mu-mimo and beamforming, I have learned only the beamforming needed to be turned off.  Note: I only have mu-mimo on and and all other 3 within the advanced settings are now off. 

To get to this resolution I did the following:

First, I was initially using separate 2.4 and 5 ghz SSID's which would allow me to place my straming devices like smart tv, on the 5ghz and then all my smart home/smartthings is on the 2.4.  I liked having this but because I was having this drop randomly, I need to first have the redundancy so using the smartconnect feature where there is only one SSID should solved this by having the device that might be connected to 5ghz and loses signal, should in theory reconnect pretty quickly to the 2.4 but that doesn't happen, at least not immediately and in the case of my mac mini, I have to manually select the SSID again even though it is showing and is set to auto connect..

I work in IT and have had my own consulting business for over 20 years so yes, I do know a thing or two about networking so this one was truly pissing me off.  Would I recommend the R9000? Absolutely NOT.. Stick with ASUS.. I have the RT-AC87U that has always been a go-to backup but with the home on the Gigabyte networking I wanted to get the most out of my wireless and I could only ever get about 135 mbps on the ASus unit. With the R9000 I can get upwards to 700mbps on my mac mini for example.  But the reliabilty wasn't there.

So at this point I have one SSID using the smartconnect feature. I only have the 'enable mu-mimo' selected.

I have also disabled (even though with smartconnect you shouldn't have to) the broadcast of 5 ghz SSID and have the 60 ghz which is not being used, disabled completely.

Figuring by disabling the transmitter/receiver that is not being used, it would help prevent any power loss on the other radios and not bring in any further interferrence. 

I have not had a dropout for about 18 hours and feel pretty confident I have solved the problem.

One other thing, I do use a wifi analyzer to analyze the frequencies as there is a lot of wireless in my neighborhood.  The R9000 does rock some serious power and I am almost doubled the db's from my nearest neighbor. I check the channels regularly as I do NOT use the automatic settings.. I have only had to change my 2.4 channel once in the past year but since I have never really had troubles with 2.4 frequency dropping the only reason I changed channel was better strength and less interferrence from neighbors.  

Finally, I have the 20/40 coexistence OFF

The firmware is the latest which presently, is 1.04.12 and yes, I have reverted to two previous versions to see if it helped and no it did  not.

The thing with troubleshooting, as I am sure most of you reading this have learned, is that you can only make one change at a time to know if you have found the correct solution so this has been something that I have been working on for over a month.. reading all of your solutions, hoping that I had figured it out but until I got to the point where I couldn't even sit through one football game (playoffs) without being dropped every 4 minutes. I had had enough.. 

Would I recommend the R9000 ?  No, not now and not for quite some time, since the tech support people are useless, I am questioning future netgear stuff.