MultiNav Pro+ BLE 50km range - line of sight only or usable in suburban terrain?

@David Wilson yeah, you're reading the spec correctly — 50km is the drone-to-drone number where both modules are airborne and you've eliminated ground reflections and obstructions entirely. That's the ceiling, not the floor.

 

For your suburban/semi-rural scenario the more relevant number is probably the 5km ground-to-ground figure, and honestly in mixed terrain with houses and tree lines I'd plan around something in that range rather than trying to extrapolate down from 50. The two biggest killers in that kind of environment are Fresnel zone obstruction from low hills and buildings, and foliage absorption which hits hard at the frequencies involved — a dense tree line can eat several dB on its own.

 

Where it gets more interesting for asset tracking is if any of your nodes have elevation on them — even mounting a module on a rooftop or a pole at 5-10m makes a meaningful difference to line-of-sight clearance and can recover a lot of that range back. The 15-20km man-to-drone spec is basically the proof of that: get one end off the ground and the link budget improves dramatically.

 

What does your deployment actually look like — are both ends ground-level, or do you have any infrastructure you could mount on?

Realistically in suburban terrain with houses and tree lines you're probably looking at 1-5km practical range, maybe pushing 8-10km if you've got elevation on your gateway side and decent antenna placement - the 50km is very much open field/clear LoS. The bigger killer in my experience isn't even the structures, it's the 2.4GHz noise floor in residential areas dragging your effective sensitivity way down, so I'd factor that in when sizing your gateway density for the deployment.

Thomas nailed the noise floor point - that's honestly the thing that bites most people on first deploy in residential areas. I'd also add that multipath from buildings can do weird things to your RSSI readings, so if you're sizing gateway density purely off range numbers you'll want to add more overlap than you think you need, especially near anything with metal roofing.

Echoing what Thomas and Patricia said, and just to give you a concrete number from a deployment I did last year in a semi-rural suburb outside of Portland - we were getting reliable links at about 3-4km with gateways at rooftop height, dropping to maybe 1.5-2km once we got into the denser residential streets. Ended up needing roughly 2x the gateway count we initially budgeted, so if you're in the planning phase I'd honestly just design around 2-3km effective range and call the 50km spec what it is - a max theoretical that you'll basically never see outside of a field test.

Joseph's 2x gateway count rule of thumb tracks with what I've seen too - honestly I'd even go 2.5x if your suburb has a lot of those newer metal-clad builds or anything near a school/hospital where the 2.4GHz environment gets really gnarly. One thing worth adding: if you have any flexibility on antenna height at all, even getting a gateway up an extra 3-4m can recover a surprising amount of that lost range in the transition zones between streets.