Yes, we did try with another laptop. It actually was worse there. That may have been that laptop. It kept losing track of its network card. The primary laptop has a pretty good track record for wifi but I know that is subject to change.
Forgot to include a snapshot of the loss graph. I hadn't previously got a good look at the volts graph under it (wasn't driving). Interesting. Not sure if it's causative or correlative. Suspicous nonetheless.
Btw, we were not sending commands during most of the time represented by this graph. Sending and receiving does not correlate at all to the drop outs.