@Susan Garcia yeah, your instincts are right — the 50km figure is drone-to-drone, both units elevated with no ground reflections in play. For your scenario with equipment on the ground across rolling terrain, you're looking at the ground-to-ground spec which is 5km under good conditions.
That said, 5km ground-to-ground on a rural property with hills and tree lines is still genuinely useful — most of that terrain won't be a complete signal killer, it'll just eat into your margin. Metal outbuildings are the trickiest part honestly, since they reflect and block RF in unpredictable ways depending on geometry.
One thing worth thinking about: if you can mount even one unit at height — on a roof, a pole, a water tower, anything — you recover a significant chunk of that range because you're partially getting back into the man-to-drone profile. That's where 15-20km becomes realistic. The module's receiver sensitivity is what gives it headroom that commodity BLE doesn't have, so it tends to hold a usable link longer into degraded conditions than you'd expect.
What kind of equipment are you tracking — is it moving or stationary? That might affect whether a fixed elevated relay point makes sense for your layout.
