Hi wvmarle,
Thanks for the reply and apologies for the late response, I did as you suggested and turned around the host and client, (which is how I had it at the very beginning). I finally got this thing working reliably and get a fast connect with over a 100m distance. just using a short wifi antenna salvaged from some old hardware. Its working so well now I have ordered a higher gain antenna from aliexpress.
The biggest issue I had with this was the wemos hot wifi dropping out, using Wifi Scanner on Win 10, I could see the wemos signal dropping in and out, at a almost random fashion. 20 sec on 10 sec off etc. I went back to some of the host example code provided with the arduino ide and the wemos wifi was stable.
So it was something in my code causing it... I cut and pasted sections of my code across until I could reproduce the problem. The line of code responsible was.
WiFi.softAP(ssid, password,1,1);
,1 for channel and the second ,1 for hidden ssid.
after removing the ,1,1 the wifi was stable and adding some more code for fixed IP, channel, and mac address, the wifi connection became fast and quite reliable.
I would still like to have a hidden ssid but not sure how to code it now.
Anyway it turned out to be a fruitful project, with a nice learning curve.