Setting up network with newer and older AirPort Extremes

Okay, I thought this was going to be so simple. I have a newer (like a year old - square) Airport Extreme that I have three computers wirelessly hooked up to in the house. Great... so now, I want to hook up the old iMac in my son's room that doesn't have a wireless card to the network. It is too far away to use the ethernet cable into the back of my newer Airport Extreme station so I figured I'd dust off the old saucer type base station, plug the ethernet cable into that in my son's room and then just easily get the old base station to network with the newer one wirelessly.
Not so easy. The newer one has no reference how to make a network with other base stations whatsoever and the old book describes how to with the Airport Admin Utility which is not available to the newer version, just Airport Utility and it does not have the WDA options listed. I tried to extend the network and then Doh! The whole network disappeared.
Is this a compatibility issue with the older and newer base stations? Would it just be easier to put in a wireless card to my very old iMac, if that's even possible? Has anyone successfully networked an old and new base station together? If so how?
Thanks!

Welcome to the discussions!
When you have an older "g" device (the flying saucer) and a newer "n" device (the square one) in order for them to communicate using wireless only, you must configure both of them in what is known as WDS configuration.
This is a quite tricky setup for most users. The best set of instructions that I've seen for this comes from expert user Tesserax in this thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2355832&tstart=0
If you elect to try this type of setup, you will probably need to hold down the option key on your Mac while you click on the Wireless Mode selection box to get the WDS option to appear. (My guess here is that Apple "hides" it because it slows down the network substantially). But, it's the only way to do what you want to accomplish with and old and new device.
Other options would include the wireless card you mentioned for the iMac. Even better might be a pair of ethernet powerline adapters. One adapter goes near the AirPort Extreme and the other near the iMac. The AC wiring in your home transmits the ethernet signal of the powerline. Works great, almost no configuration required and better than wireless in many cases.

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    Message was edited by: Kadege

    Kadege wrote:
    Ok Jolly, thank you, but I started this thread to get in contact to somebody who knows the solution, i.e. has done this before.
    Jolly Giant wrote:
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    edited by the Jolly Green Giant (where Green stands for environmentally friendly)

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