The Ubiquiti stuff with their AirOS software is very good and lets you do some interesting tricks with where your signal is on the channel. Picostation and Bullet are great products and you can operate part 15 (unlicensed) or part 97 (ham). Directional gain antenna and one of these units will only set you back about $150.
Ah - another UBNT fan. Yeah, AirOS is very, very impressive. These guys have done some first-class work with that heavily hacked embedded Linux kernal of theirs. I suspect that we’ve only seen the beginning of what promises to be a very sophisticated distributed networking platform. The next big push will be more effective VLAN management and configuration - everyone wants it. Also, check out their AirControl product. I can monitor all of our sites in one app, distribute updates, sequester potential ‘problem’ units for observation and lots more. Very cool. I don’t directly manage our WAN infrastructure outside of our sit-to-site VPN links (most of it’s MPLS now), so I don’t see the SolarWinds alerts. But AirControl lets me see instantly when a site goes down, so those little radios are like canaries in a mineshaft.
Best of all - it’s amazingly cheap, but robust and reliable. I’ve got a bunch of sites using this gear for intra-plant datacom and networking, and in some pretty tough industrial environments. Haven’t had to replace one yet in the two years we’ve been running them.