@Jason Griffin good question, and you're thinking about it the right way already.
The 50km figure is drone-to-drone, both units airborne — that's the spec where ground reflections are eliminated and you've got clean line-of-sight with no Fresnel zone obstruction. Once you put both units on the ground, you're looking at the 5km ground-to-ground figure as your realistic baseline, and that assumes reasonably open terrain.
For your 8-10km sensor node use case, the honest answer is: you're not in comfortable headroom territory if both endpoints are ground-level, but you're also not necessarily out of the game. Elevation helps a lot — even getting your remote node a few meters up on a mast makes a meaningful difference because you're clearing vegetation and terrain undulation out of the Fresnel zone. Rolling terrain with trees is going to hurt more than flat open field because you're losing line-of-sight intermittently rather than just dealing with free-space path loss.
My practical suggestion would be to treat 5km as your guaranteed floor with both units near ground level, and think of anything beyond that as bonus range you're earning back through antenna height and placement. If your node can go on any kind of elevated structure — fence post, small tower, rooftop — you'll likely hit your 8-10km target comfortably. If it's genuinely ground-mounted in terrain with trees and rolling hills, I'd want to do a site survey before committing to that link budget.
Has anyone else here run field tests in that kind of terrain? Curious what real numbers people are seeing.
