Hi all,
I am interested in purchasing a UAV for a family farming operation in Central America. I know next to nothing about the technology other than what I've learned over the past few days, but our situation is specific enough to merit an explanation.
We manage farms that are located quite far from where we live (8 hrs drive time). While we have local support on location to manage the day-to-day operations, it still requires a nearly weekly trip by the owners to make sure jobs are getting done correctly and everything is in order. These trips usually take place via either car, which makes it a multi day trip, or by helicopter, which is much quicker but much more expensive.
As such we are interested in an "out of the box" technology to perform the very simple tasks of surveillance and mapping. For now we do not need any advanced crop surveying technology or IR, but if we could get a video file or photo collection sent back to the office in the city, it would be extremely valuable to us.
We would want to keep the UAV on site and have someone local send it up once a week or so, so need something with autopilot that can follow a pre-planned flight path and send back a video/photo link. All the operator will hopefully have to do is take it out of storage, set it up, push "start", and collect and store it after the flight. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what we should be looking at? I have looked at several models and am interested in the eBee system.
Your thoughts are appreciated.
Replies
Wow!
It's not so easy, yet.
Please, inform:
1- distances to flight over farms until landing strip;
2- have you a UAV pilot available?
3- What you want see on videos/photos? plantation, Crop, wood forest?
4- Max budget $?
Hi, thanks for your reply.
- This would be for tracts of up to 300 acres each (probably less).
- No pilot, which is why I need something with autopilot that only requires a person who can set up the take-off, landing, and watch it as it performs the pre-planned flight path. There are no UAV pilots available where we are.
- We want to look at plantations of coffee, palm trees, and wood forests.
- Would like to start at maximum $50,000 if possible (preferably less) as we learn.
Those farms are side by side, near each one?
The landing strip area will be close to these farms?
If yes for booth, and if possible perform few flighst per day just replacing batteries and start new flight, it's much more simple to solve.
My drones could perform 3 km² (740 acres) per 50min flight.
Just PM me if interested. I'm based in Brazil.
Thanks!