As the TP-Link Archer T3U arrived, I was investigating how the NAD C388 was connecting to the Asus mesh router system, again this is made-up of AC3100 (master) and three AC1900 (nodes) spread throughout the house.
What I found while digging into the ’weeds’ of QOS and which device is connected to which mesh node, and watching the traffic analyzer for activity on the C388, which I had just fired-up using BluOS (from my laptop)... C388 began playing like it always does - then abruptly lost connection. Just before that happened, C388 was showing full 2.4GHz signal strength connected to a mesh node just a floor below (although it is a concrete slab and on the other side of a Bedford stone wall).
Just then, the notorious yellow exclamation point showed-up in the Asus control screen. I know what this means... there is a router firmware update available. Asus releases frequent updates, and I’ve had this issue before (several times), when there is a router update ’pending’, the C388 gets glitchy. So approved the Asus router update, which took all of 5 minutes, and now everything is good!
Something about pending router updates the C388 doesn’t like. I had also locked the C388 to the garage mesh node (via Asus router control), that can be good (if you don’t want it floating around amongst mesh nodes) and it could be bad (if the node it’s locked to goes down or gets over-used by other devices). Removed the lock on that, let it roam if it wants. Also enabled automatic scheduled updates on the Asus mesh - see if that helps avoid these issues in the future.
So, ultimately the answer was check if there are pending updates for the wireless router and approve them.
