keynote remote keeps losing connection

I keep losing the connection between keynote remote on my iPhone and my MacBook. The other night during a presentation we had to keep reconnecting, sometimes it connected quickly and sometimes not. Finally, after losing the connection for the 4th time or so, during an hour long presentation, we gave up and manually advanced the photos from the Mac.

since we didn’t know if there would be WiFi there or not, I created my own network ( and when you do that the default name is my computer and the default channel is 11). It worked fine, but after 10 minutes or so the connection was lost. Is this just a bug in Keynote or is there some other way to avoid this problem? Is another channel better? I have no idea what those channels are for.

thank you!