I bought 2 Ubiquiti NBE-M5-16 High-Performance airMAX Bridge NanoBeam M5 16dBi for $140 in 2014 and they will by far be your easiest and best solution.
That's doing it right. I've read many favorable comments about Ubiquiti's modern gear. If I needed to do it right I would follow your example.
So far I'm mostly playing with this ancient unsupported $8 toy I found. I wish Ubiquiti still had manuals online for it, but no, it's a complete orphan.
I'm home in town at the moment. I set up the Powerstation5 last night and turned it face-down, to not beam signal to its 35 mile(!) range. With output set minimum it shows signal strength lower than a wifi repeater at the other end of the house so I'm not blasting the neighbors. I configured it as an Access Point then linked my phone through it and out to the Internet. Everything works as expected.
So far it seems this will do what I want to accomplish, broadcast wifi to the ranch's guest cabin from the ranch house. I'll see if the 3 degree beam width is a limitation there. I might need to add a repeater to re-broadcast signal into all corners of the cabin. And I don't know if its receive sensitivity is sufficient for this one-way service. I think in theory, slow inbound signal won't be a significant limitation but we'll see. If this works, it should make Roku practical at the cabin along with general internet for my kids. And there should be a sweet, narrow spot for hundreds of ft out into the orchard beyond.
I've always liked playing around with network stuff. I started before wifi and when Ethernet card ip's were set with jumpers. Now, playing with obsolete network gear is a cheap hobby.
One question: I set up a device access password. Next to the Ethernet input there's what looks like a reset button that hopefully would restore defaults. But with no documentation - I don't want to brick the thing. On your later Ubiquiti gear is that a reset button? Does it need to be pressed before power-on, or some other magic that isn't obvious?
