I'm considering buying the Ubiquiti Amplifi HD mesh kit (router plus 2 mesh units) to improve WiFi coverage of my home and would appreciate any comments on whether this is likely to be a good solution for my particular use case.
I live in a bungalow with a VDSL connection, a pfSense router/firewall and most of the computing and network gear in a study at one end of the house. A WiFi AP located here doesn't provide a useable signal at the far end of the house and I don't really want to use an Ethernet cable to connect to the far end. Over the years, I've used a WiFi extender at the mid-point but this had poor reliability and performance. I've also tried using a separate AP at the far end, linked to the LAN in the study via powerline adaptors. I've experimented with the secondary AP having the same SSID as the main WiFi AP and with it having a different SSID. None of these configurations have been entirely satisfactory: when there are two APs with the same SSID, portable devices tend not to switch to the stronger signal; when there are two APs with different SSIDs, it's a nuisance having to reconfigure devices when they move around.
So (sorry that description is rather long), I'm considering a mesh system and quite like Ubiquiti gear. The Amplifi HD user guide illustrates a multi-hop configuration with the main AP at one end, a mesh unit at the midpoint and another mesh unit at the far end. This seems like a good match for my needs but the documentation doesn't explain how it works. My concern is that so-called mesh systems that rely on the central unit communicating directly with each outlying unit in a star configuration is unlikely to work in my particular case.
Can anyone confirm that with the Amplifi system, the middle mesh unit acts as a relay between the two ends? If so, and providing that performance is adequate and that mobile devices switch automatically to the nearest unit, this seems like it could be the solution that I need. Any comments are most welcome.