moca & rth settings

[pepper]

there you go, that's a good use for your older drones. i sold my mavic 2 pro and used the funds towards the mavic 3. i'll probably skip the mavic 4 unless there's a really good upgrade on the camera or some other must have feature, i'm not a fan of trading up every new generation.

 

[AlanLichty]

I originally bought the Air 2 with no clue as to whether I would be able to fly a drone or not. I had some nerve root damage that kind of wiped out my right arm for about 6 years but after having a couple of disks in my neck yanked out I do have enough coordination in my right hand now to handle the controls.

After trying my best to love the Air 2 camera I gave up and bought the M3. It was the case that I sold my 25' motorhome last spring so had some loose change in my pocket to enable the upgrade. I replaced the original RC-N1 controller with an RC Pro last summer so probably won't be on the market for another upgrade soon.

 

[pepper]

i'm glad it worked out for you to be able to fly. it really is a useful tool for getting into places where you can't get for a photograph. i'm excited to see better cameras on drones in the future.

 

[AlanLichty]

You can get almost any camera you want on a drone for the right price. Just not one most of us can afford

 

[pepper]

yea, we have them. a couple of big old matrice 600s, an arsenal of zenmuse cameras & lenses. i flew a matrice 600 with one of the pricier zenmuse cameras on it right after i became a drone pilot and then found out that it cost more than my car. glad they didn't tell me that before. during covid we almost bought a fixed wing drone like another state uses, but we ended up deciding against it. but none of the cameras really compare to what's in my camera bag, or what has been in my camera bag for the past decade. the mavic 3 is pretty nice, but i feel like i could get better images & dynamic out of my old fuji x-pro 1 from 2012. there were rumors that dji would release a new phantom with a modified fuji xt-something built in. but doesn't look like anything ever happened with that.

 

[AlanLichty]

You almost need something like the Matrice that allows for something like a Canon or Nikon DSLR (or mirrorless) if you really want to replicate what we do with what we carry in our camera bags and I am assuming that you aren't dragging around a Phase One like Vieri does One of those things costs more than what I paid for my first house back in the 1980's.

When I was first working with remote sensing data for the Utah Archaeological Center in the early 1980s most of the photogrammetric images we had access to were shot from modified fixed wing aircraft that had an opening in the floor behind the pilot with something like a Hasselblad on a hard mount pointing straight down to capture the countryside below. Some of those aircraft are still flying and competing for aerial survey bids with the drone pilots albeit with new digital camera gear. Until BVLOS is approved on a more widespread scale they can often win the bids since they can cover far more ground in a single flight than a drone pilot.

 

[pepper]

now you need a quarter of a million for a down payment on a house.

we used to have a bunch of large print aerial maps from back in the day. they laminate them and draw boundaries/jurisdictions on them with erasable markers and hang them on the wall. i think it was for special events. they had some with permanent markers, too. the detail in the maps was pretty good, but you could tell it was old. we still have some of that old equipment on the state police helicopters. but most of it has been upgraded with newer equipment. the newer rigs show the video from the chopper and overlay it with lines showing housing developments, property lines and shops/buildings/landmarks if it's known what they are. all of the roads have road name overlays. it's pretty impressive to see in action.

 

[AlanLichty]

Some of the aerial photos from the 80's were shot with large format film and were the definition of high resolution in their day. Everything now is stuffed into the GIS database and you can add and subtract layers at will. I am a nut case for maps and layers

Just for grins I looked at the Phase One web site and found out they sell a version of their camera system just for drones - ready to mount on the drone of your choice. 150MP. I think you have to call them to get a price and I am guessing that if you have to ask you probably can't afford it.....

 

[pepper]

i definitely can't afford a phase one camera for a drone. we looked into them for work and it was something like $25k usd, and not for 150 mp. i think it was for 50 mp. ended up going the zenmuse route, 24 mp is more than enough for what we needed.

a few months ago we had an airplane mounted graflex camera in the shop that i sell my work in. it was from the 60s or 70s. it was more affordable at $150. i thought about it, but i really don't need another camera sitting on a shelf. i started out doing gis work for the state as a summer hire. it turned into a full time gig in the ops room. i'm a geography nerd, too. love me some maps.

 

[AlanLichty]

I was a sucker for higher and higher camera resolutions for decades and almost bought a graflex speed (4x5) back in the early 1980's. It was being surplused by the University of Utah Archaeology Center where I worked at the time but I lost out when another campus department decided they wanted it and campus departments had priority over individuals. Now I am finding that since I don't print much any more having more than 20-30MP is really quite adequate. Arguably you can have more room to crop down to what you want with a higher resolution camera but you can also compose the shot better to begin with and dispense with the need for more pixels.

I was a mapping nut as an archaeology graduate student in the 1970's and was quite used to being able to mark a site we found on surveys using USGS quad sheets and a brunton compass. GIS still feels like cheating but I can live with that. My mapping fetish got amplified a lot when I was hired on by the Anthropology department to create a computing facility in the early 1979. I did a write up on that a couple of years ago on here. Our campus Geography department wasn't pursuing GIS when we had a need for it and ARC/INFO wasn't even vaguely affordable for mere mortals so I ended up rolling our own software to let us use a NASA LANDSAT analysis suite that was mostly a collection of FORTRAN applications loosely aggregated into what NASA called the ELAS (Earth resource Laboratory Application Software). It was an interesting adventure but I would rather spend my time playing with someone else's software than chasing through reams of FORTRAN trying to fix other people's poor code.

I am still a hard core mapping geek and love the tools we now have to play with

 

[pepper]

i missed out on the not so good old days of computer graphics. my first memories are from the very late 80s. i started out in art and got into photography in high school in the early 2000s. photoshop was already the thing to learn.

at work we use a program called cad (caller aided dispatch, not the engineering software). it's a dispatch system that connects every public safety center in the state so we can track what everyone at an incident is doing. it also gives us jurisdictions based on the address. as the gis person at work i had to map out everything in arc gis and load the map sections for our jurisdictions in cad while we were in the build process of the program. thankfully, no coding required anymore.

the only thing we do with nasa is report when we break the rules while flying drones so we don't get in trouble.

 

[AlanLichty]

I am far more familiar with CAD applications for 911 dispatch than I would like. I left the academic world in Utah to work in the private sector in the late 1990's when I landed a job with a telecom carrier up here in Vancouver. I left that company to work in a couple of different startups before landing a position as a primary network administrator for Clark County. The network included the regional 911 canter (Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency or CRESA) and I spent a lot of time working with them to set up networks and services. That included being around while they changed CAD vendors to one that was a disaster (Intergraph) in its own right. It never did work right and the vendor blamed every problem they had on the network so we had to prove that the network was fine every time something went wrong. That resulted in more than one all nighter while we put network sniffers on the wires to demonstrate that their software was the problem and not the net. They were a royal pain in the ass to work with and happily CRESA was getting ready to switch again to a newer CAD vendor with more GIS friendly software right as I was heading out the door for retirement. I was glad to not be around for that next transition. Moving 911 dispatch procedures to a new system while they are a live service gets a bit twitchy to put it mildly.

Playing with my drones, cameras, and woodworking is a lot more fun than that was

 

[pepper]

we had a cad nightmare too. the original vendor we purchased had to be beat with a stick by our it guys just about every week. we only had 4 agencies on in the beginning. the software was great when it worked. the software was bought up by another company. we held out for awhile, but cad was on its last legs and we needed more agencies on board to have full communications. all of the agencies got together and picked a vendor. it happened to be the one that bought the company we were using. some of the other agencies were using another vendor.

the new cad setup was horribly complicated. there are 4 different software programs or servers to access to change settings. there's no logic like all ncic settings and new user settings are in one spot and gis is another, it's just jumbled together. the company is decent to deal with, they've acknowledged their product needs work and they've fixed every thing we've brought to their attention. it took a few months to get everyone set up and online across the state. this even included the state university police department, fireboard and natural resources. less than a month after we went online with it, we found out the company hacked and all of our data may have been breached. every time there's an update we have issues., usually minor, but we lost our gis database for 24 hours a few months back. the whole thing had to be rebuilt from a backup and then reuploaded. so everytime we got a cad we had to geolocate it ourselves to figure out jurisdiction. the gis mapping on this cad is fantastic.

 

[AlanLichty]

Sorry to laugh but you are reminding me why I was so glad to reach retirement age.

I was the network geek in the middle of these kinds of changes in the server rooms. I know what its like to go to sleep knowing that the dispatch folks have your home phone number.

 

[AlanLichty]

Are you guys involved in any of the BVLOS efforts for first responders? Examples would include drone delivery of defibrillators to PMs onsite while the ambulance is starting to roll.

I just finished reading through the FAA ARC on BVLOS and saw quite a few examples of who wants new BVLOS rules and why. Not a short read FWIW.

 

[pepper]

nope, we don't attach anything to our drones that isn't part of the drone equipment. our emergency management agency did a staged rescue once by delivering a life jacket to a tv host "trapped in a river" for a show. but there's way too many headaches with sending equipment in any useful fashion. we've done search and rescue with the drones, and used an attached speaker to kick people off of the beaches during covid. luckily, we don't have enough wildlands in the state for any real sar ops.

as for medical emergencies, it's not really needed in my state. the longest you can drive on a highway before reaching a state border is 2 hours. we have maybe 50 paid firemen in the whole state, everyone else is volunteer. so all of our fire money goes to our ems. we have more emts than we need on the fire district, city, county and state level.

 

[AlanLichty]

Simple sounds good. Most of what I read sounded like there were/are some serious hurdles to getting operations going and evaluating the results. Texas is doing a lot with the urban first responder stuff where everything is flat with wide open spaces.

 

[pepper]

there are some pretty strict rules and regulations that can't be broken when you're hauling stuff. texas is a great place to try that, we have too many housing developments around.
i'm only on the east coast for the next few years, hoping to move west and start my next life when i get my retirement from this state.

 

[AlanLichty]

I find myself still scratching my head over the drone delivery notion. I keep seeing images of a multi rotor drone hauling some carbon delivery box with the usual hoopla and have to wonder how that is going to work on a rainy day (we have a few of those up here). Worse yet is what airspace they are going to operate in. From the sounds of it the FAA ARC on BVLOS wants to let them play in the 4-500' range but at some point they still have to drop down to deliver the goods. This will be with autonomous flights where the PIC is running 6-10 drones at once so life for recreational drone users (and 107 for all that matter) is going to get interesting to say the least.

Texas can be their playground for a while - I don't have any reasons to go down there to fly myself

 

[pepper]

i don't see the drone delivery idea taking off anytime soon, esp. for commercial deliveries. too much insurance & liability crap to sort through. plus the line of sight will likely not be waived for commercial services nearly as quickly as it would for public service.

i can see it being used in a natural disaster to deliver supplies, like the small community in california that's using a zipline since the storm went through. or people stuck in yellowstone np during the flooding last summer. not sure if it's true, but one of my drone class instructors said an insurance company was the first in the country to be granted a bvlos waiver to survey damage after a tornado.