I appreciate the replies, much of what's suggested was addressed in the initial post. A friend has connected to the WiFi with both his Smartphone and laptop and was able to navigate to the Web. He walked all around the house and even outside and always had a useable signal. I have no neighbors to interrupt my signal...not a house or a soul within 3/4 of a mile, just the way I like it.
As for rebooting devices, modems, routers, cameras etc occasionally need a reboot. I have digital timers set up to interrupt power to the modem/router (integrated gateway, Xyzel PK5001Z via Centurylink, the DSL supplier) at 8:30 am and pm, power restores after 15 minutes. Leaving the modem/router time to renegotiate for 15 minutes I have timers set to interrupt power at ( am and pm and restore 1 minute later. The Smartplugs have nothing plugged into them, I use the temperature readout to monitor house and garage temps to insure the heat is still on in a northern winter climate. The critical missions are insuring the heat is on and the basement sump pump hasn't failed, which has one camera pointing directly into the crock. I worried less about security...should someone clean me out in my remote location the insurance company will buy me new stuff. I'm concerned about long term damages should the furnace or sump fail.
I used this system last year with the only difference being dumb mechanical timers that occasionally didn't restore power. I replaced them with digital models that have worked flawlessly in the 3 month shakedown cruise prior to my flying south for the winter. Incidentally, I have a 17 KW whole house, natural gas fired generator with automatic transfer switch. The modem/router and cameras are connected to UPSs to cover the 30 seconds it takes the generator to power up. I even have an identical spare modem/router set up to be swapped in should a failure be suspected. Both gateways were used for 6 months and alternated in order to be sure a replacement would be reliable. I've got the bases covered and the weak link appears to be the Cloud server system. As I previously stated, this happened last winter in early February and mysteriously cameras and plugs became randomly available after a couple of weeks. A few days of random connections and everything returned to normal for the balance of the winter.
As an aside, many things went downhill with the MyDlink Home v3.01 upgrade. The Smartplugs dropped out of the dedicated no-longer-supported Smartplug app and I had to use My Dlink Lite to access the cams, Home to access the plugs. Their are some shortcomings to the entire system, in my opinion. Email alerts for sound or motion detection sometimes took 2 - 3 hours to show up. Real time SMS would be a much better method of alert.
I plead total ignorance regarding direct connections. I initially installed the cameras using the downloaded Setup software, it worked so I didn't dig deeper.
