My home is about 3000 square feet, 2 stories (2nd story only covers about half of the area of the 1st story though, if that makes sense). I have an old Orbi mesh system (https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Orbi-RBK14-100NAS-Whole-System/dp/B083D7PL47) which I got a good deal ($100) on 4 years ago. It has a router and 3 satellites.

It has generally worked well in the house (some minor weak spots that are far away and through a lot of walls) but it’s been fine. The problem has been that I’d like to get it into my garage, and I’ve been having a lot of trouble with that.

The router is positioned as close as possible to the garage, right at my back door (glass). The satellite in the garage is about 40 feet away, in the window. So there’s pretty much a direct line of sight (albeit through two windows). There’s essentially no signal from the garage satellite.

I had some success keeping the satellite outside, about halfway between the garage and the house. However that meant I had to wrap it in plastic, etc. to protect it - obviously not ideal. But in this case the signal in the garage was fine. It really seems the problem is the distance from the router to the garage satellite, however that’s less than the distance to the other satellites in the house which are going through more walls also (and those work fine).

1. should things be working better the way I described? My dad says his wifi (not sure what he has but it is also AC1200) works great in his garage, which is much further away than mine is, and through brick walls.

2. can I get any random router, and plug the Orbi router into that? Would that help? (my dad says this is his setup and claims it will work)

3. should I look into something like the TP-Link Deco outdoor access point?

My internet speed is about 200 mbps which is totally sufficient - this includes two people working from home full-time, streaming video, etc.

Thanks.