As an update to my post. Last night, after 3 weeks of solid performance it started cutting out again. My setup at the time was 'cellular data' switch was disabled and the phone was NOT in airplane mode. I had done an IOS update two days prior so maybe that screwed with it. After fiddling with it for a while what I finally did to make it stable again was to re-enable the 'cellular data' switch and put the phone fully into airplane mode (disabled WIFI also), then turn on WIFI again. Basically I did what I described in #1 from my first post. That worked for the rest of the night.
One additional thing I noticed while doing all this is that if you pay attention, when the audio starts cutting out my Roku app also briefly looses connection to the ROKU and I can no longer control it (like hitting pause). It's not due to WIFI strength or instability.
