Airport admin can see Base Station, but only via direct ethernet connection

Question

After resetting my snow (dual ethernet) base station, everything went well with the Airport Admin Utility reconfiguration. But after unplugging the ethernet cable between my computer and the base station, I'm not able to detect the base station wirelessly. Searching for "other" networks won't work. I've tried changing passwords, base station names, location names, network names, using the hex password. I hope I'm missing something obvious. Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Yes, the wireless network name (currently Apple Network xxxxxx), does not appear in the list. My iBook and Snow Leopard iMac cannot detect it, nor can two iPod Touches in the house. Nor can our Wii. All of which used to before all this. All these are able to detect other networks -- basically, all of my neighbors and then some that come and go.
I have not tried bringing the base station to another building. That’s a good idea.
I have tried http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20683 and kept getting stuck at the configuration stage -- where it seems to reset the ABS, but after which the ABS does not appear in the Admin Utility window. Finally, after many, many attempts at a hard reset, I’m almost positive the whole config & software upload took. My only evidence is that with the ABS still connected to my iBook (OS X 14.11 running Admin Utility 4.25) I can finally double click on “Base Station” and see lots of setting options, the correct Apple Airport ID, etc. In other words, as you guessed, I can see “(and, presumably, change) the wireless network name in the AirPort tab of AirPort Admin Utility (the default is something like "Apple Network xxxxxx") when connected via Ethernet.”
What led to this? It all started when I was trying to get our Wii on to our wireless network. But the Wii wouldn’t log on. It gets foggy after that (I’ve tried so many things, I’ve lost track of the initial steps creating the problem). I might have tried changing channels or something from my Snow Leopard computer, having forgotten that my Snow Leopard computer can’t administer my dual ethernet ABS. It’s possible it really started with turning on and off my DSL modem, which forced me to reset my DSL password with ATT.
Come to think of it, that might have been how this all started. After turning my DSL modem on again, ATT wanted me to download special software for me to reset my password. That wasn’t working (whatever it was would never load. But, I found a way to do it online. Otherwise, my browser kept spitting me back to ATTs password creation page.) By the time I went to my iBook to get into my ABS, remembering that was how I needed to tinker with it, to get back to the original Wii issue, I had lost all connections to my ABS.
Until now, where I can at least see the ABS again in the Airport Admin Utility -- via ethernet connection only.