@Mary Rodriguez yeah you've got the right read on the 50km number — that's drone-to-drone, both modules elevated, ground reflections essentially eliminated. The spec sheet breaks it down as 5km ground-to-ground, 15-20km man-to-drone, and 50km drone-to-drone, so the elevation of both endpoints is doing a lot of heavy lifting on that top figure.
For your use case though — 8-10km across flat rural land — you're actually in a pretty comfortable zone. Ground-to-ground in open terrain with good antenna orientation, you should have solid margin to spare. A tree line or a barn introduces multipath and some signal loss but at 2.4GHz with the external amplifiers on this module, you're not going to fall off a cliff the way you would with a commodity BLE chip. Rolling hills are the one thing I'd actually think about more carefully, since a true Fresnel zone obstruction at the midpoint can hurt more than people expect — but if your terrain is genuinely flat, that's not really your problem.
The honest answer on "how much does it degrade in semi-rural" is that it depends heavily on antenna placement height. Even getting your node a meter or two off the ground makes a real difference on the ground-to-ground link. If you can mount them on a post or pole rather than sitting at ground level, 8-10km in your described environment should be very achievable.
