Roughly, yes Aisha, and that’s where Kevin’s problem comes from.
LoRa sends a chirp, a tone that sweeps across the 125 kHz channel. A symbol is one chirp; where in the sweep it starts encodes the data. The spreading factor says how many bits one symbol carries: SF7 carries 7 bits and has 2^7 = 128 chips (steps) per sweep, SF12 carries 12 bits with 4096 chips. Each step up roughly doubles the time on air, and the receiver gets more time to pull a weak signal out of the noise, so range goes up.
In LoRaWAN those are data rates. EU868: DR5 is SF7, DR0 is SF12. Far devices need DR0 to DR2, and at those rates the most application payload you can send is 51 bytes. DR3 allows 115, DR4 and DR5 222. Your 58-byte frame physically can’t go out at the slow rates, so as soon as the tracker drops to SF10 or below, the stack refuses or the frame is lost, and nothing reaches the frames log. Your 11-byte sensor fits at DR0.
Two fixes. Pack the payload under 51 bytes: lat/lng as scaled int32 instead of floats or text, battery as one byte. And for trackers, turn ADR off on their profile, the network server adjusts on the last 20 uplinks and a moving device changes faster than that; set the data rate in firmware by distance instead. Table on Regions and frequency plans.