At the start I had thought that I should move my AirPort Extreme from my study to the external mount under my eve and connect it to the large outdoor antenna. I bought some small wires to replace the internal antennas on the AirPort that had external antenna connections on it. It was a bit of a messy process, but I have pictures below. I followed the directions on the MacWireless website, even though I didn't buy the antenna connectors from them (Amazon had them for $5 or so).
The first step, removal of the rubber pad on the bottom didn't go so well.
This is the plastic plate below the rubber pad - its easy to remove the five screws and move on to the next step.
Removing the guts of the wireless router wasn't straightforward. It didn't want to come out and had to be wedged out with a screw driver. I was a bit hesitant to do so but it wasn't too hard.
I drilled a small hole in the side (1/4") to allow the new antenna cables come out
Shown, with two external antennas hooked up.
Rubber pad reinstalled and (close to) good as new!
So at this point, I realized that I didn't have a 1 Gbps switch to put in the place of the AirPort and decided that it might be better if I just left the normal house network alone and added a new wireless access point to the back yard. It seemed to make sense, but in retrospect may not have been the right answer. A 1 Gbps 5 port switch isn't much more than a low end wireless router. So why not just have a separate network in the back?
So the first and really only glitch is that the low end wireless routers (even those with external antennas) have fixed antennas. Not those easily screwed off. With that knowledge, I decided that an online purchase might not be the best idea and headed out to MicroCenter (on my way to a BBQ) knowing that I could at least look at the device before I bought it. Bad idea. The sales folks knew nothing. And none of the wireless routers were out for display. The only ones for which I could be sure that they had detachable antennas were the Amped Wireless models. I ended up spending $75 on an AP300 - about $50 more than I had originally intended to be laying down.
The installation of the AP300 started out well enough, but I ran into one very odd and unmentioned (based on my searching) quirk about the device: you can't connect it into a normal ethernet wire, or it will not work (I think it anticipates getting power - POE - and won't work). This caused a bit of problems until I figured that out. I ended up putting a female/female ethernet connector in the box on the house so that I could use the special 4 wire cable instead of trying to wire one correctly myself.
After all of the above, it's now working all the way back to the far side of the pool. I tested it with my Google Nexus 7 streaming video. That device has the worst wifi performance of any device I have, so if it works, then its all good.
The one quirk is that our iPhones are super flakey now. My MacBook Air works just fine (can keep a VPN connection forever, good speeds when surfing), but the iPhones just freak out. Not sure what is going on here, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that both the TimeMachine and the AirPort Extreme are broadcasting the same SSID. I am going to change the one is the stereo cabinet and see if that clears things up.
My network now looks like the following:
