I currently have an airport extreme base station that is a little inconsistent at the extremes of it’s range. It seems easy enough to add another base-station through the airport utility on my iMac. Can I use any base station, particularly from another manufacturer or do I need to buy Apple equipment?
Only Apple WiFi bases will talk to the Airport Utility. This is a mixed blessing as that is all they will talk to. But it is a neat utility, and works well when you do have a number of base stations to manage. In the past I have found some oddities between different manufactures of the WDS protocol used to extend a network wirelessly, so that too would point to staying within the Apple family.