said by baess:BTW I'm right up the Fox river from you.
But probably not within WiFi range.
It is looking more like a router firmware issue.
Assigning a static IP outside the DHCP range would probably be a setting you would make in your laptop, rather than on the router. Just pick an IP that's a little outside the DHCP range, and assign that. I used to do that at one time, though only with wired. The router was giving out 192.168.1.2 through 192.168.1.50, so I picked 192.168.1.100 and assigned that.