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I've spent the best part of 4 hours trying to set up a second Airport Extreme on windows for my iPhone, and getting nowhere fast. (Why is this stuff so incredibly complex!)

Gripe over. Well, here's my story:

Got the first Airport set up yesterday in my home office, and it was working well with the kind help of this forum.

So I bought the second one this morning, plugged it in to the network plug in the wall upstairs, and now the iPhone will only pick up this one, ignoring the one downstairs - even though the orange light is flashing upstairs and the one downstairs is a comforting green.

After googling my problem and finding no answers anywhere, I went to the Airport Help. It was obviously designed for techheads because most of it is gibberish, and in my case the Airport Utility section which distributes the IP addresses is greyed:

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"Using multiple base stations in an Ethernet network

You can set up multiple AirPort Extreme Base Stations to create a single wireless network (known as a "roaming" network).

To set up a roaming network:
Connect all the base stations to the same subnet on your Ethernet network and give the same network name and password to each base station.
To assign IP addresses using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), set up one base station as the DHCP server.
Make sure the base station assigns a range of real IP addresses. Private IP addresses used by Network Address Translation (NAT) cannot be used for roaming. To set up the base station to assign a range of IP addresses, click Internet in the toolbar, click Internet Connection, and then choose "Distribute a range of IP addresses" from the Connection Sharing pop-up menu.

Set up all of the other base stations as bridges by turning off DHCP and NAT. To do this, click Internet Connection in the toolbar, click Internet Connection, and then choose "Off (Bridge Mode)" from the Connection Sharing pop-up menu on the base stations you want to set up as bridges."
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I really don't know where to start. Right now I would seriously give up all computers - if my income didn't depend on using them - and go and work in a fish shop. Any assistance very welcome!

Just in case I'm not explaining it very well, here's a quick diagram of my setup.

OK, thinking about the problem... my iPhone is recognising the upstairs Airport, and the live icon appears onscreen, but I cannot use it - it fails after I start a connected application.

So I figure the Airport is not being seen by my router. Maybe the Cat5/6 network in the house is not connected to the upstairs.

Also, only the downstairs Airport is showing on Airport Ultility when I test.

Wish I knew what to do next.

Without putting too fine a point on it you're doing it wrong.

Don't connect the second Airport to the router. Instead use Airport Utility to get the second Airport to join the existing wireless network.

What's happening in your case is that the two Airports are conflicting with each other as the default IP Address ranges will be the same.

By joining the second Airport to the existing Airport network you aren't providing an extra IP Address range you are in fact simply boosting the range of the current one and using that one's IP Address range.

I never would have figured that out. There's absolutely no indication of this anywhere in the manual or Help.

So I've removed the Airport 2 from upstairs and brought it down here, removed the network cable and plugged it in. It is cableless now.

It is blinking amber. Utility doesn't see it. And I've gone through all the options in Utility to add it, but there's nothing that indicates where.

Here's the setup showing the three tabs in Airport Utilities as I've set them:

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reset the second airport. it will appear in airport utility after that.

Done that - nothing happens.