Ubiquiti NanoStation M2 - Wireless Access Point - AirMax (NSM2US),White

Can I give this six stars? Ten?We have a barn some 300 feet from the house. It has no power. We want to use wifi there. After much research, I found the Ubiquiti products. Basically, it's a mighty radio. Hook it to your network via an Ethernet cable and it makes you a broadcaster. Configure as a hot spot (access point) and you have wifi many hundreds of feet away. It's directional but is so powerful that I am getting the signal all around the house as well as at the barn and inside the barn. Running Speedtest, I got tons of bandwidth. (They have non-directional products in case you need to blanket an area, and these devices can be networked so that you can cover any facility (this is how stadiums and office buildings are networked).Plus:- OMG, does this work well. Blasting signal everywhere.- Quality: Beautifully made and attractive- Can mount indoors or out.- Includes Power Over Ethernet. You hook your router to a supplied power box which has a power cord; then you plug a long Ethernet cable into the other port on the power box and it goes to the Nanostation, which only needs the one Ethernet cable.Minus: Configuration is not for everyone. Pretty technical. But that's a consequence of how flexible these devices are, and there are many online guides and videos from Ubiquiti and others; and their online support is terrific. If your need is covered by one of the videos or online guides, just go step by step. While I am fairly experienced in IT and networking matters, I failed when I did it without a guide (some arcane settings -- in my case bandwidth had to be set to 20 MHz because most phones, iPads, etc. do not support the 40 MHz default. There were some other hard to guess settings.)A final shout-out to their online support, which I pestered several times before purchase. Their product line is very complex and it took a while to determine what would meet my needs. But they have the experts and gave me my answer.Rock solid, high-performance solution if you need a super-strong wifi signal.

I initially used a pair of the NSM5 trying to transfer our 108mbps connection. It goes through about 3-4 walls with drywall / wood siding possibly some trees. The NSM5s did work but the signal strength hovered between 2-3 bars. Signal strength was -76 to -80 which is not super great. The speed test resulted in 24mbps on a good day.I bought another pair of the NSM2s since I read it works better with obstacles.Out of the box, I noticed the signal strength was at 4 bars no matter which way they faced.. When I took it to the remote location, I was impressed that the signal strength was 4 bars. Did a speed test and it gave me 92mbps.Based on my little experiment, I would say the NSM5 may be better if you have a clear line of sight as in a long pole clearing all the obstacles in the way.The NSM2 is better with obstacles.The cable company told me it would cost $5000 to run a line to the other house and it would take 2 months and I will have to pay them $60 per month after that. For $170 total investment, this can't be beaten. It also is more secure in a way that robbers can't cut the cable or phone line to disable all your security cameras.Highly recommended!!!Edit: I discovered that the default signal strength was 28dbm which is the highest level available. It also radiates the most power at about 600mw. FCC limits indoor antennas to 100mw. The good news is that reducing the signal strength by 3db cuts the power in half so by reducing the signal strength to 17dbm, I should be in the 50mw range which is half of the FCC max. I can also go another 3db up but since it is in a bedroom, I chose to be a little on the safe side. How did impact the signal?? On a clear day, I was able to get 75mbps which is not bad and when I tried it on a rainy day, I got about 45 mbps which is also not bad. My criterion is that I would be able to watch 2 netflix streams and with 45mbps, those can be 4k streams if I want to.EDIT: IMPORTANT TIPIf you don't have your unit next to a window like I did, I used a wifi extender with an ethernet port to install the unit next to a window... The difference was night and day.. The connection speed now is up to 85mbps and it is raining outside.. Before I used the extender when it was going through the two walls, I was getting 30mbps.. It also helped me reduce the radiation which was the main reason I moved it..