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Phantom 4 RTK Officially Announced

Moosewax

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DJI Launches The Phantom 4 RTK Globally - sUAS News - The Business of Drones

For all you aerial surveyors out there, this looks potentially exciting. This article claims it can geotag using RTK or PPK, which until now required 3rd party hardware and software.

Around $7000 USD for the aircraft, another $2-3000 USD for the DJI Base station.

Looks like my M600 is going to be getting mothballed for orthophotography in the not too distant future if this thing holds out to be true.

We are looking at the Sensefly eBeeX for mapping large areas.

So Phantom 4 RTK for small projects (the majority of our projects are less than 100 acres) and Sensefly to clean up the rest.
 
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DJI Launches The Phantom 4 RTK Globally - sUAS News - The Business of Drones

For all you aerial surveyors out there, this looks potentially exciting. This article claims it can geotag using RTK or PPK, which until now required 3rd party hardware and software.

Around $7000 USD for the aircraft, another $2-3000 USD for the DJI Base station.

Looks like my M600 is going to be getting mothballed for orthophotography in the not too distant future if this thing holds out to be true.

We are looking at the Sensefly eBeeX for mapping large areas.

So Phantom 4 RTK for small projects (the majority of our projects are less than 100 acres) and Sensefly to clean up the rest.

The Inspire 1 will map about 10 acres without much hassle. More than that requires a lot of batteries on hand. 50 acres we can manage with every battery we own (5 TB47s and 4 TB48s) under ideal conditions with no wind. I guess my point is a prosumer aircraft is only really good at small areas. You are better off with a commercial grade aircraft if you are doing anything over 25 acres. For nothing else the time savings.
 
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mEh.

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welcome_to_the_jc27bb.0.jpg
 
The Inspire 1 will map about 10 acres without much hassle. More than that requires a lot of batteries on hand. 50 acres we can manage with every battery we own (5 TB47s and 4 TB48s) under ideal conditions with no wind. I guess my point is a prosumer aircraft is only really good at small areas. You are better off with a commercial grade aircraft if you are doing anything over 25 acres. For nothing else the time savings.

What altitude/overlap settings are you using? I regularly map 100+ acres with the P4P and find that it works great.
 
What altitude/overlap settings are you using? I regularly map 100+ acres with the P4P and find that it works great.
90-100 Ft AGL to maintain 0.5 GSD with at least 85% overlap for decent 3D coverage. Control points are their own GPS units and accurate to within 10 mm with correct placement. Exported work files are generally within 5-15mm accuracy as far as geolocation. We still spot check with a couple of Geo 7X Trimble units to verify mainly elevation data compared against a fixed benchmark network we own.

Our main problem right now is a 12MP camera which sucks (to be gentle). We are in the process of upgrading to a 42 MP Sony RX1-RII and a new aircraft (FireFly 6 Pro) to be able to cover 100+ acre sites multiple times a day.
 
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90-100 Ft AGL to maintain 0.5 GSD with at least 85% overlap for decent 3D coverage. Control points are their own GPS units and accurate to within 10 mm with correct placement. Exported work files are generally within 5-15mm accuracy as far as geolocation. We still spot check with a couple of Geo 7X Trimble units to verify mainly elevation data compared against a fixed benchmark network we own.

Our main problem right now is a 12MP camera which sucks (to be gentle). We are in the process of upgrading to a 42 MP Sony RX1-RII and a new aircraft (FireFly 6 Pro) to be able to cover 100+ acre sites multiple times a day.

Gotcha. That's really good accuracy! I'll be interested to hear about your experience with the Sony and FireFly!
 
Gotcha. That's really good accuracy! I'll be interested to hear about your experience with the Sony and FireFly!

Me too. We are adding another 5,000 seat extension in two years with an option on another 50 acre addition. The numbers say I should be able to operate at 400 FT AGL and complete 100 acres easily on one battery in under an hour. It will not improve the accuracy. The only thing that will improve that is someone much younger than I with better eyesight at the controls of the software (Pix4D) in the post-processing phase. 95% of our current inaccuracy is operator induced during processing.
 

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