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| FWIW, here's what I know.
There are a lot of options available if you are (or have access to) a good wireless network technician. They can take the Ubiquiti or Engenius gear and do just about anything you want with it. A good guy will have set up a lot of outdoor networks, and should charge accordingly for the knowledge he has collected doing that.
The Ubiquiti AirMax M products, like the PicoStation, have a "semi-pseudo-mesh" mode based on Wireless DIstribution System (WDS) - you can use a PicoStation, for instance, as a "repeater" for another Ubiquiti access point. It doesn't work with other brands, and my own experience experimenting with it was that you were limited to two Ubiquiti devices - when I added the third device, it started a network storm and shut down my network. But one PicoStation on the roof to provide WiFi around the house and farmyard and another, for instance, on the grain bins to provide WiFi there will work, although it's not simple to set up. I'm pretty sure there are good directions on the web. I only tried it once and I didn't like it - your mileage may vary.
The Ayrstone products are currently Ubiquiti hardware running our own firmware, which makes them behave completely differently from the Ubiquiti products. We actually use a variant of OpenWRT with standard 802.11s meshing built in. This allows the AyrMesh products to "just work" out of the box - they don't have any on-device configuration, you plug them into your router to download your configuration information.
Ubiquiti has recently introduced their own outdoor meshing product, but it is meant to compete with Aruba, Cisco/Meraki, Aerohive, etc. - they are very low-power (0.1 watt output) access points designed to provide maximum bandwidth (speed) over a small area. The idea is that you can use a lot of these to provide good signal over a larger area, like a lodge, campground, or RV park. Because they are low-power, they can't be placed as far apart as the AyrMesh Hubs - the maximum would be about 1/4-1/2 mile for the Ubiquiti mesh, but the Hubs, which put out almost a full watt of power, can be up to 2.5 miles apart. Open-Mesh has been selling similar units for years (although theirs are indoor units with outdoor enclosures - I like Ubiquiti's outdoor design better).
All single-radio repeaters will cut the bandwidth in half at each hop - that includes repeaters (also known as boosters or extenders), WDS units, or mesh - meshing is just a really smart form of repeating the signal. AyrMesh is designed for maximum range, NOT maximum bandwidth; it is designed to provide pretty good bandwidth over a huge area, like a farm. The other outdoor meshing products (Ubiquiti, Cisco/Meraki, Aerohive, etc.) are designed to provide very good bandwidth over a much smaller area. So, to get really good coverage around your farmyard, pretty much any of these products will work, although I think AyrMesh is the simplest (and I am biased).
If you want to have a network over an entire farm (or a large part of a farm), then AyrMesh is the only thing I know of that works without hiring a good wireless networking tech. If you want to set up a wireless network for a hotel, RV park, campground, or other public space, one of the other low-power, high-density products makes much more sense (they also have features like captive portals, bandwidth throttling, and whitelists/blacklists that you want if you're offering WiFi to people you don't know) and we recommend them highly. In general, we try to discourage people from using AyrMesh for "hospitality" use, because that's not what we made it for - it is designed to make it really easy to extend a Local Area Network (LAN) across a farm.
I hope that helps folks understand the differences between these products - I have played with them all, and what I learned from all of them went into the creation of AyrMesh, which, to my knowledge, is still unique in the market. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about that!)
-Bill Moffitt
Ayrstone Productivity
P.S. please check the Ayrstone blog (blog.ayrstone.com) for my thoughts on LoRa, Sigfox, etc.
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Outdoors Wireless farm network ....Ayrstone
