@John Thomas good question, and honestly a really practical use case for the module — rural asset tracking with intermediate nodes is exactly where this thing shines compared to anything BLE off-the-shelf.
I don't have exact field numbers for your specific terrain type, but here's what I'd work from: the 5km ground-to-ground spec assumes both ends are at roughly human height with relatively open ground. Rolling hills and treelines will eat into that, probably landing you somewhere in the 1-3km range per hop depending on how dense the obstacles are. Outbuildings are less of a killer than you'd think if you can mount nodes with even a little elevation — getting a node up on a roof or a fence post a couple meters off the ground makes a meaningful difference in clearing ground clutter.
For a loose mesh across a large rural property, I'd plan for 1.5-2km as your conservative hop budget and place nodes accordingly, then test and adjust. The modules handle retransmission gracefully enough that a slightly marginal link won't just die on you — you'll see degraded reliability before you lose the link entirely, which gives you room to tune placement.
If you want to share rough dimensions of the property and where the main obstacle clusters are, I (or someone else here) could probably give you a more grounded node placement estimate. A few people in the community have done similar deployments and I'd love to hear their real numbers too.
