@Michael Hawkins good question — the short answer is that for a reliable link at 30-50km, you really want matched modules on both ends.
The 50km spec is a drone-to-drone figure, which means both units are elevated and you're eliminating ground multipath and Fresnel zone obstruction. The link budget is symmetric — if your peripheral is putting out the full RF front-end performance but your central is a lighter setup with lower sensitivity or a weaker PA, you're going to see asymmetric link quality, and in practice that tends to manifest as dropped packets on the uplink exactly when you need telemetry most.
If your base station is ground-based and the sensor node is elevated (drone or high-mast mount), you're looking more at the 15-20km man-to-drone range envelope, so 30-40km at that geometry is pushing it without both ends being properly matched. The practical move is to run two MultiNav Pro+ modules — one per end — and let the symmetric RF design do its job rather than trying to compensate on the base station side with something lighter.
What's the deployment geometry on your sensor node — is it airborne or ground-mounted?
