Hi Tony, welcome at the forum.

For sensors the best mode is Low power mode. In low power mode it can take up to a second to make a connection to the gateway. If you use MQTT it take almost no time to move it into the cloud.

The data you can send has to be moved into a ListOfByte. There are all kind of functions to store and retrieve data from a ListOfByte. Sending more or less data has not much influence on the power usage. The frequency of sending is a big factor though.

-John-