dudleyjohn Or will both my tablet and the AA+ have to be on the same MAC address device?
Your ASIAIR and your tablet just need to bth be on the same network.
If you are using the ASIAIR as a hotspot, the ASIAIR basically creates its own network, whose SSID is "ASIAIR" (you can change it, in case you have multiple ASIAIR). The ASIAIR will also give itself an IP address. With hotspot mode, you need to connect the tablet to the ASIAIR device's network. Notice that unless your tablet has a concurrent cellular connection, yor tablet will not be able to access the Internet, since the ASIAIR device does not have means to connect to the Internet.
If you are using ASIAIR in Station Mode, it assumes there is an existing network (with the router's SSID) that both the tablet and the ASIAIR will connect to. In this case, the IP address of the ASIAIR device is assigned by the router. In station mode, your tablet is connected to the home network (and therefore be able to use the Internet, if your home network is connected to the Internet).
In short, in hotspot mode, the ASIAIR device generates its own IP address. In station mode, the router is the one that assigns an IP address to the ASIAIR device -- usually though a mechanism called DHCP.
If you add an extender to the home network, you can usually tell the extender to use its own SSID, or quite often, be able to use the same SSID as the home network. In station mode, the ASIAIR device will then be configured to connect to the extender's SSID, if it is different from the home network's SSID.
In either case, the tablet needs to join an existing network, and that is done through the network's SSID.
After connecting the tablet to a network, the ASIAIR app then connects to the ASIAIR device's IP address.
I.e., tablet's networking is through SSID (the "address" of the network). App connection is through an IP address (the "address" of the device) in the network.
If you have only one ASIAIR device, you typically do not need to know its IP address. When your tablet is on the same network as the ASIAIR device, the ASIAIR app should be able to find and connect to that device without explicitly telling the app the ASIAIR device's IP address. (It is really poor planning that ZWO names the device and the app both as "ASIAIR.")
A MAC address is an address that is burned into the NIC (implememented by some chipset that lives in a device), although more computers, tablets and phones are now implementing randomly changing MAC address to thwart crooks like Facebook and Google from tracking your device, and learning your habits). With the ASIAIR, you seldom need to worry about a MAC address, unless you need to uniquely identifiy two ASIAIR hotspots that both use the same default SSID and same default IP address (e.g., two ASIAIR at the same dark sky site). It is best to assign a unique SSID to an ASIAIR if you use it as a hotspot at a dark site that you share with others.
Chen
