Joined about 2 months ago
Quarry surveyor, weekly stockpiles
on Anyone using drones in a quarry or open pit mine?
We fly quarries weekly. For highwalls, we fly a separate oblique mission at 30° camera angle parallel to the face. This gives much better 3D reconstruction of the vertical surfaces than nadir-only. For water: we mask it out in processing and interpolate the pit floor from surrounding points. Some software (Pix4D, Virtual Surveyor) has water surface masking tools built in.
on Multispectral sensors for agriculture surveys - recommendations?
We added multispectral to our services 2 years ago. Revenue from ag work is about 25% of our total. Good margin but the clients expect fast turnaround - they need actionable data during the growing season. Calibration is everything. If you don't understand radiometric calibration, the data is meaningless. Take a course before investing in hardware.
on Stockpile monitoring dashboard we built in-house
This is exactly what we need. What's the latency from flight to dashboard update? And how are you handling the base surface - static or does it update?
on Battery management in cold weather - what's your approach?
Insulated lunch bag + chemical hand warmers. Cheap and effective. I also plan shorter missions in winter - 20 min max - and just do more flights.