Hi friends,
My name is Sebastián Kohn, I am from Quito, Ecuador, and am completely new to the world of drones. I work in several conservation projects in Ecuador. At the moment I am working on a research project finding and monitoring andean condor nests on cliffs on the mountains here. We think that there are only about 50 wild condors left in the country! So we need all the help we can get!
We need to get a drone to monitor the nests which are very inaccessible. In the past year we have found 2 active condor nests, which is about half of all the nests historically found and documented in the country by researchers! Sometimes we have to travel at leas one day by car, horse and foot to reach these locations. And then we can only see the nest from across a canyon 500m or 1600ft away.
We need to buy a drone with the capacity to:
1. fly over 3500m over sea level around 11000 ft.
2. It has to be able to cope with very strong winds
3. Can be transported easily to remote locations.
4. Can fly at least for an hour?
5. Be as cheap as possible
I was thinking that perhaps a copter would be better than a plane, but don't really know.
Can someone with experience please help me out with this?
What do you recommend?
Any help will be appreciated.
Sebastián Kohn
Andean Condor Conservation Group Ecuador
Replies
you wont get a multicopter that can fly past 20 mins
Since no one has responded yet, I will try to provide some info. First, if you have not gotten connected to Conservation Drones then I would suggest you do that. They are a good source of info for the type of work you are planning.
conservationdrones.org
I would guess that there are some instances where a copter would be able to hover and provide a close-up view of the nests but in other instances where you want to cover a large area to search for nests an airplane would be needed. The trade-off between close-up views and longer flight times over longer distances would seem to be the main factor to pick an airframe. I don't think the airplane option would be able to get close-up views of a nest. On the other hand you cannot cover a large area with a copter due to the short flight times. There are airplanes designed for large area photo mapping such as the Techpod which are not much more expensive than something similar without as much space for larger payloads (for example the 2013 Skywalker with the carbon tail boom would be a lower cost option with less payload capability and shorter flight times). There are also piston engine airplane options which could be used but I am not too familiar with those options.
Hopefully some others will add to this...