GMG WiFi Network Issue Resolved

I have just solved a little mystery with my GMG Davy Crockett grill. The grill’s WiFi can currently work in one or two ways:

• Local Mode. The grill’s internal WiFi acts as a stand-alone access point, requiring you to point your phone or tablet at the grill and nothing else. Limited, but actually useful when you are using the grill “on the road”.
• Network Mode. The grill can log on to your network by WiFi, and you can connect to it via any WiFi access point your network.

I had Network Mode working, but with some limitation. It seemed that even with the network mode connected, I could generally only see the grill if I connected to the specific WiFi access point the grill was connected to. Connecting to an access point in my house failed to connect to the grill, even though the garden WiFi and house WiFi are on the same network, and – for other purposes – can see each other.

Stranger still, if I connected to the garden access point, and then connected to the grill, I could sometimes wander into the house, reconnect to my house WiFi, and still see the grill. But after a while it would drop, and to reconnect, I would have to either go out in the garden again, or wave my phone out the window in order to connect again.

This kind of defeated the whole purpose of Network Mode for me, as I want to be able to monitor my controller’s temperature probes (grill and food) while I work (or watch TV), but the garden WiFi doesn’t reach into my office, and barely into my lounge. I figured the issue was down to some strangeness in the configuration of my access points, and how DHCP was handing out addresses, but couldn’t trace the problem.

It turned out to be a programming issue, and nothing to do with my network. When you tell the app to find the grill, it notes the WiFi SSID you are connected to, and *only* looks for grills connected to a WiFi point with that SSID. I had my house and garden WiFi points named differently – partly because it amused me to have a “BBQ” access point.

There is no reason why a household shouldn’t have multiple SSIDs, but the GMG app doesn’t allow for it; nor is this stated anywhere. It took me to read an obscure comment on a BBQ forum to learn of this.

I changed my garden WiFi name to the same as the house, and now I am sitting at my desk, with a strong connection to the grill out back.

Apparently, GMG do not consider this a bug, but they do have “multiple access points” on their wish-list.