@James Anderson yeah pretty much nailed it — the 50km figure is drone-to-drone with both units elevated and clean sky between them, which is why that number exists. Ground-level suburban is a different beast entirely because you're fighting multipath, absorption from vegetation, and partial blockage from structures all at once.
The 5km ground-to-ground spec is actually the more relevant baseline for your deployment since that's measured with both modules at roughly phone height. In a suburban environment with some elevation on your nodes — even mounting them a couple meters up on a pole or roofline — you should realistically get 2-4km links with decent reliability, and if you've got any elevated ground or can get nodes above the roofline consistently you'll push that further.
The antenna question James raised is genuinely the biggest variable here. If you're running the stock antenna configuration and your nodes are all ground-mounted behind fencing or in enclosures, you're leaving a lot of range on the table before the RF environment even becomes the limiting factor.
What's the topology looking like — are you doing point-to-point links between fixed nodes, or are you hoping to hop across the network? That changes how aggressive you need to be with link budget.
