I’m not a terribly good story teller, but I figured I would share what I did recently to cover my property in wireless. I’ve been in need of an outside access point. Of course there is no consumer equipment that fits my needs. My goal was to cover a 200 foot radius from where I would mount the AP on top of a 16 ft metal pole near the center of my property. I ran a direct burial FTP Cat5e through the side of my house, under a sidewalk and 80ft in a shallow trench I dug with a flat spade. That isn’t quite ideal consider the cable is only a few inches under ground, but it was considerable less work than digging the recommended 2 ft trench through roots and rocky soil. For the antennas I used two 7dBi Linksys antennas that were on an old router. Again, not quite ideal, but cheaper than a MIMO antenna. These antennas are not made for outdoors so I used Corrosion X to coat the SMA connector and flood the inside of the antenna. I’m confident that they will be fine, but it’s no big deal if I have to replace them down the road. I have a solid connection up to about 700 ft line of sight. I can go about 1000 ft before I drop connection. Throughput drops pretty quickly after 700 ft. I’m probably hitting the limit of how far my Nexus 5 can talk back rather than what the Rocket can do.
From what I understand, my setup with the Rocket M2 is very similar to what you could expect from a Unify AP Outdoor+. I went with the Rocket M2 just because it was cheaper and I don’t like the Unify controller.