@Charles Lopez yeah, honest answer — the 50km figure is drone-to-drone with both modules elevated and ground reflections eliminated. That's the theoretical ceiling, not what you'd plan a deployment around.
For your environment, the more relevant spec is the 5km ground-to-ground number, and even that assumes decent antenna placement and reasonably clear paths. Metal structures and concrete buildings will hurt you — metal especially, because you get both absorption and multipath reflections messing with the signal. Forklifts moving around are more of a transient issue, they'll cause momentary drops rather than permanent dead zones.
The good news for an asset tracking use case is that you probably don't need continuous high-quality link across the full site simultaneously — if you're running nodes in a mesh-style topology and your assets are moving, you can design around the obstructions rather than fighting them. Antenna height matters a lot here too; even getting a node up 3-4 meters on a pole can recover a surprising amount of range in a cluttered environment.
What's the rough site footprint you're working with? If it's under a kilometer or two across, you're almost certainly fine even with the obstructions. If it's larger, mesh routing between fixed nodes is probably the architecture you want anyway.
