Q: I have a airport extreme base station and we use our neighbors wifi. Can I use it to extend the network or does my base station have to be plugged into her router?

I got the iMac logged into the cellular modem/WiFi router and turned on Internet sharing set to share WiFi connection via Ethernet.  Then I connected an Airport Extreme base station via Ethernet to the iMac.  It works great but... When I first switch on everything it takes sometimes hours of restarting checking connections etc before the base station is actually connected to the internet.  Then everything is fine until I shut down the computers again or until I lose the cellular signal which happens a lot when local cell towers go down.  Then I start all over again with turning Wifi off and on, restarting apps and computers, etc to get it working again.

While all this hassle is going on I often have everything looking like its working but the DNS is not working.  I tried setting URLs of public DNS services in one, the other and both macs but it didn't work and the setting switched back to the address of the Cellular modem/WiFi router.

The only reason for all the hassle I can think of is that the computers, base station and cellular modem all have to be started up in a specific order.   Is this likely?  Or am I missing something?

----------Add an AirPort Express in your home as close as possible to the neighbor's home and set up the Express to "add" or "join" the wireless network. Then ----------connect an Ethernet cable from the AirPort Express to the AirPort Extreme and configure the AirPort Extreme to "create a wireless network"

Hi, I tried this with no luck - read elsewhere that when using an Airport Extreme to join an outside network the ethernet port is disabled. Is this true, and is there a workaround?

WiFi is supplied at my condo, but it only allows 3 connections, I need at least 5 so I wanted to set up my own network.