My family owns a ranch with 160 acres. I started thinking about using a drone to check on the cattle not to long ago after hearing about the neighbors cattle going missing. My problem is I need something that can give me live FPV and be able to have the range to cover all 160 acres. Setting up way-points would be very helpful too. Not sure if I should go with fixed wing or rotor wing either. I'm very new at this so any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Thanks for the help J Smith! Really good info! And I especially like the idea of a mounted paint ball gun. Eventually I will have to start a new project with one of those installed as well as a Fixed Wing plane. For now I have started on building a quad-copter with the following components:
Frame: Tarot Ironman FY650
ESC: ZTW Spider 30A OPTO (quantity of 4)
Motors: T-Motor 3110 470kv
Props: 17x5.5
Alternate Props: 22x5.5
Motor mounts: Tarot Φ 16MM clamp type motor fixed seat / black TL68B25s
Battery: 8000mAh 4S
RC: Dragon Link V2 Complete UHF Long Range 433MHz RC w/Micro Rec
Flight Controller: APM 2.6 (+Neo M8N GPS) W/ Stand, 915Mhz Telemetry
Not sure what else I'm going to need other than a remote controller and the camera setup.
Anyway, I'm pretty much learning this as I go so helpful advice is always appreciated. Thanks again!
Oh boy, if you go for the paintball option and catch anyone in the act, make sure you share the video here!
For what you are describiong, I have a couple suggestions...
I am biased toward multirotors myself, but I think you might want to go with a fixed-wing plane, both to cover a lot of territory, and to be able to do it in one flight (speed). The secret to making it work as you need is a very simple concept:
Craft weight - payload weight - battery weight - flight time
If you want to carry equipment of any kind, that generally requires more power, as in bigger motors - not as much of an option with fixed-wing hobby planes unless they have externally mounted motors, but if you modify or build from scratch, then you have more freedom for that.
More or bigger motors means more weight, which means less payload, less flight time, and/or more batteries for more flight time.
Multirotors spend most of thier energy pushing down to keep them up, but fixed-wing planes use the lift of thier wings to keep them up, which makes them better for your purpose for the reasons stated above.
The more batteries you can put on it, the more choice you have in what size motors, what equipment you can mount, and how much flight time you have.
Beyond this, I have a rather radical idea for you...
There are, out there, pepper-spray type of paintballs for paint ball guns. If you could find the smallest, lightest paintball gun possible, you could mount it to the drone, and this could be used against the russlers themselves at the time, on site.
Of course, if they are bad guys, they might want to take out a shotgun and shoot your drone - but if your drone is fast, and you can fly it well at all, you might be able to do a hit-and-run method where the drone is quickly too far out of range for a shotgun, or to get a quick aim with anything else. Also, flying back/away in a zig-zag would make it difficult to draw a bead on it in the first place.
If you wanted it to be accurate in shooting mace/pepper spray paintballs, a multirotor would be best for that, as it could hover for a couple xseconds while you line up the shot.
One other possible advantage to a multirotor is that if you wanted to just do FPV and otherwise keep it light, you could come from behind them, sneak up on thier vehicle(s), and get a close-up picture of thier license plate to give to the sheriff, and then be gone before they know what's happening or can shoot at it with any hope of hitting it.
Another good thing about multirotors is that instead of flying away, you could have it fly rapidly straight up out of sight. This would be good to avoid it getting shot, and also would be good if you were worried about the rustlers trying to follow it back to you, out of aggravation that they have been seen/caught
It might even be possible, if not now, in the near future, to send the picture of thiem and thier vehicles via a smart phone to the police, maybe even sent from the department to the sheriff's vehicle if they have a computer in it, and they could spot the rustlers and have proof while en-route once called, and cut them off at the pass, so to speak, lol.
There are a lot of possibilities, and maybe this will give you some ideas to think about.
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