I'm interested in the point-to-point bridge and have looked at some Ubiquiti products but it all seems a bit beyond my abilities. One question I have: would a pair of Ubiquiti Nanostations effectively act as a wireless "ethernet cord" between two routers and/or a a base station and satellite? I.e. could I plug my modem into my router/base station in my garage, run a cord between that router/base station into a nanostation, beam the signal to the nanostation in the house, and then plug that nanostation into a router/satellite in my house?
Yes-like a wireless cord. A permanent installation with maximum speed would probably require the bridges (or at least their antennas) to be mounted outside the house. It might work well enough inside though.
A related question: If I did run a physical ethernet line between the buildings or if I used a point-to-point bridge, can the Orbi use it as a backhaul channel between the base station and satellite (as is the case with eero)?
You cannot currently connect the Orbi router and sat with a wire, but the feature should be coming in a future firmware release. You could run a wire between the modem in the garage and the Orbi router though.
Finally, I know people have asked this question elsewhere, but has Netgear ever difinitely stated how far the Orbi stations can be from each other before the connection suffers if there's a direct line of sight and no walls or obstacles between them (except, in my case, for some windows)?
Netgear cannot give a meaningful specific distance, because it depends upon the RF environment and reflections off nearby obstacles, which will always be unknown factors. Also different types of windows can affect the signal differently. People on this board have estimated ~50' as a typical max distance for a decent sat-router connection in a home. Mine are 33' apart, with a couple walls between.
