@William Gonzalez yeah this is a really important distinction to understand before you commit to your deployment layout.
The 50km figure is the drone-to-drone spec — both modules elevated, ground reflections eliminated, essentially ideal RF conditions. For your sensor node use case where the modules are closer to ground level, you're looking at the 5km ground-to-ground range as your more realistic baseline. That said, the module does have solid receiver sensitivity and external amplifiers that give it real margin over commodity BLE, so light tree cover and rolling terrain will eat into range but won't kill it the way it would with a standard module.
For a wide-area sensor deployment, the smarter play is probably to think in terms of a mesh topology rather than trying to stretch single hops to their limits — a few elevated relay nodes can cover a lot of ground even in terrain with obstacles, and you'll get much more reliable data throughput than pushing the edge of range in challenging RF environments.
What kind of elevation are your nodes sitting at, and roughly what terrain are we talking? That'd help narrow down what you can realistically expect hop by hop.
