I have narrowed down my massive issues on the lan here to the powerline bridge I am using to take network out to the shed where I have a server and another wireless accesspoint since the house doesnt reach there reliably.

What happens is if the mac address of the laptop moves onto the shed accesspoint then it is no longer reachable from the lan in the house till something times out in the bridges - about 1 min. Then if it comes back to the house's accesspoint it cant reach the server in the shed till the same thing times out in the bridges.

Ethernet cable across the lawn - works fine. Bridges - constant dropouts of no network as the laptop changes between accesspoints. In the interum I have renamed the accesspoint in the shed to a different ssid so I change manually when I have the laptop outside in the garden where the house it too weak to work.

I will be putting conduit in when I dig for the new waterpipe but that is way down the list of things to get around to. Are the newer 200 megabit powerline adaptors any better at having mac addresses move between one end of the bridge and the other. I tried a wds bridge across the wireless and it is happy with the laptop changing between them but the signal is bad and with the repeating it makes it so slow that it struggles to get 70kB/s on downloads vs the 200-230 (line speed thanks to the adsl line length to here) I see over the powerline bridge or a direct connection, and it makes copying onto or off the server really really slow vs the really slow I get on the bridge.