I can certainly do a USB update, but could we try to resolve the i-PAD connectivity itself if thats OK?   Thats more important to me than sculpt at the moment.   I know theres an answer, and it could very well be the operator..  :o) 

Well, we've actually been hearing about this problem for about a year or so now.  It only seems to happen with iOS devices connected via Bluetooth.  We had two people who were experiencing this problem send in their H9s for us to take a look at, and in both cases we tried to reproduce the problem with every iOS device that we could get our hands on, but we were never able to reproduce it.  So, it seems to have something to do with either the iOS device being used or the power supply rather than the H9 itself.  How are you powering your 3 H9s?  Are you using the supplied Eventide power supplies (if so what kind and in what country) or something else?

Every person who has had this problem has been able to update via USB.  So, unfortunately, that's what we've been telling people to do when this problem arises.  You can connect an iPad to an H9 via USB as well using Apple's camera connection kit although of course it's not as convenient to do things that way.  It would be interesting to know though if you could update in this manner.

I wonder if the timeout is in response to the wifi connection trying to download the setup file for the H9 itself?

No, that would have give you a different error message.  It downloads the entire set-up file at the beginning and checks it to make sure it downloads correctly.  If a problem occurs in that stage, the error message would clearly explain that's where things went wrong.