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MultiNav Pro+ BLE - does range drop significantly with obstacles/NLOS?

Jessica SmithJune 23, 2026
So I've been planning out a project where I need to link a few remote sensor nodes across a pretty large outdoor area - think rolling farmland with some tree lines and a couple of low hills in between. The 50km BLE range on the MultiNav Pro+ sounds almost too good to be true honestly, and I get that the 50km figure is probably under ideal line-of-sight conditions with good antennas on both ends. What I'm actually trying to figure out is how badly that number degrades when you introduce non-line-of-sight situations, like if one node is behind a tree line or a small ridge. Are we talking like 20% drop or more like 80%? That range between "impressive" and "basically useless for my layout" is pretty wide lol.
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AdamJune 23, 2026
@Jessica Smith yeah that's a totally fair concern, and you're right that the 50km figure is drone-to-drone with both units elevated and zero ground reflections eating into the signal — ground-to-ground is the 5km spec, which is the more relevant baseline for fixed sensor nodes on rolling terrain.
 
For NLOS with tree lines and low ridges, the honest answer is "it depends a lot" but you're probably looking at somewhere in the 40-70% range reduction depending on foliage density and how much of the ridge is actually blocking the Fresnel zone rather than just the line of sight. Dense wet vegetation is actually worse than a hard ridge in a lot of cases because it absorbs rather than just diffracts. A dry scrubby tree line in summer is more forgiving than you'd think, especially if your nodes have any elevation at all — even mounting them a meter or two higher on a post makes a real difference at 2.4GHz.
 
For your farmland layout specifically, I'd think about it less as "will it reach" and more as "can I add a relay node on that high point." The MultiNav Pro+ works in mesh configurations through the app, so if you've got a hilltop or even a slightly elevated point between your clusters, you can use one node as a repeater and effectively chain the range. That's probably the more reliable architecture for broken terrain than betting on raw NLOS penetration anyway.
 
If you want to share roughly what distances you're working with between nodes, I can give you a better sense of whether you're well within margin or pushing it.
Richard AndersonJune 23, 2026
Yeah the 50km is definitely a best-case open field number, NLOS through tree lines and terrain is going to hurt you pretty badly - realistically you're probably looking at a fraction of that depending on foliage density and how much elevation change you're dealing with. For rolling farmland with tree breaks I'd mentally budget maybe 5-15km as a working range and plan your node placement around that, or look at whether you can get your antennas elevated even a meter or two to claw back some LOS. Might be worth doing a quick RF link budget calc once you know your antenna heights and the rough obstacle profile.

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