@Jennifer Brown your gut is exactly right — the 50km figure is drone-to-drone with both modules elevated and ground reflections out of the picture. That's the best-case ceiling, not the everyday number.
For your rural/semi-rural scenario with rolling terrain and light tree cover, you're realistically looking at something in the 5-15km range depending on how much elevation you have on at least one end. The module's receiver sensitivity is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, so partial obstruction hurts you less than it would with a commodity BLE module, but it still hurts. Trees are actually more forgiving than you'd think at these frequencies — it's the terrain masking (hills blocking the Fresnel zone) that'll bite you harder than a few scattered pines.
If one node is elevated even moderately — like mounted on a pole, rooftop, or drone — you'll hold much better range than two ground-level units trying to punch through the same obstructions. For asset tracking specifically, if you can get even one anchor point up high, the geometry works in your favor.
