Problem with my TV dropping off the wifi

Hey, I'm back!

It's been a while, but I'm still here in South Florida and occasionally I hit an annoying problem in life and actually come up with a solution. Here's one that you might find useful if you have a Smart TV that keeps dropping its wifi connection. The problem manifested in not being able to access any content. If I went into the Network menu it also couldn't use the "Test Connection" command. I had to "soft power cycle" the TV (basically turn it off and on again) to get it working.

My TV is a Vizio P65-F1.

The root cause of my issue was that I have a second wifi network in the same house...it's actually a range extender with almost the same name as my regular network, and it has the same password. I suspect the TV was getting confused at least once a day and trying to join the extended network, which, for some reason didn't work.

I changed the extended network to NOT broadcast its name (SSID), also to have a completely different name. I configured the couple of devices that needed to use the extended network to use the new name, and for three days now my TV (Vizio P65-F1) has not had a problem.

July 2nd 2020

Funny story: turns out that WASN'T the solution. The final answer, which has worked solidly for several weeks now is that TV's wifi settings include a "gateway" which was set to 0.0.0.0. I changed it to have the same value as the DNS/router, in my case its 192.168.1.254.

I also changed the TVs settings to use a manual IP address, and I changed my router's configuration to only hand out IP address from 20 up to 253 - basically I was reserving the first twenty places for devices that I may assign a fixed (or "static") IP address. I told the TV, for example, that it is 192.168.1.5

That combination has worked fine for several weeks now. I'll update if anything changes.

If you don't have a second network in range that your TV might be using, there is good advice at https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-fix-vizio-tv-wont-connect-to-wifi-4685906