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  • Moderator

    Drug trafficking! maybe thats why so many from south America like "big" UAV systems. ;-)

  • T3

    @Marc, the last thing you need is data link when you stay within visual range as the law requires.

    The reason of using unmanned vehicle instead of FPV or RC is that they need regularly aligned photos at fixed altitude, a few hudreds of them during about 40min of flight. Something that non-robotic system cannot do.

    We have bigger system Pteryx, which stays at visual range up to around 1.5km and honestly we use datalink only for research. The reason is that for safety you need to stay focused on the plane and take decisions, change flight state with RC receiver, any extra GCS is only adding workload on the crew.

    This 2km range, however, will most probably drop to 300m when you lose it in a forest so don't count on it as safety measure.

    If they had implemented longer range system, it would be either lower-bandwidh and would have more latency (therefore unsuitable for realtime operation) and as a result woudl be a purely 'emergency recovery system' or for changing flight plan in the air. Since they are doing mapping of area known in advance, nobody really needs changing flight plane after takeoff (since the real good/bad decision is only taken after 24h photo processing on cluster computers, and the area of interest is known and as fixed as it gets).

    As you see datalink is the last thing you need in photomapping. In fact it would bind you to using GCS which relies on having a map of the area in advance, with the risk of misleaded decisions and safety risk if they are not recent. It is silly to make a system for mapping that requires knowing the map of the area in advance (imagine you have problem, GCS is based on old map, you land on what you believe flat land but since that time it is covered with a forest).

    Having a datalink just for recovery, is asking how much weight and problems you accept to bring to the airfield for the worst case scenario. Do you trade having a modem, for less active RC range and intermittent control at 1km when you still could change the flight path otherwise? Fire extinguisher, because lipo can burn after bad crash  and in dry land... How about a chainsaw, when you fly side to the forest, a shotgun if you fly near Mexican border and want to avoid your stolen UAV to be used for drug trafficking etc?

  • Very interesting system. It has a data link distance of only 2km... After that its all autonomous apparently?

  • ...coooool....
  • I received an answer from SenseFly by email, if you want to contact them I suggest you to do same as I did, write to this email address sales@sensefly.com it can take them 2-3 day to answer.
  • Admin
    e-mail ? care to elaborate if you don't mind ?
  • Thanks to all, I already recived a e-mail answer from SenseFly.
    Thanks Marco for your comment.
  • They're not registred in the swiss phone numbers index, there are some other companies at the same address and maybe they're hosted by one of them. But I think they don't wnat to be contacted by phone. Just be patient and try again. I don't think they're really 'commercial'... My feeling is that they just want some PR for the beginning, but I'm not sure if they can really deliver a RTF drone yet. The problem with these technology institute spin-offs is they have not a commercial organisation behind.
  • I am intrested in buying this product
  • Can somebody tell how to contact SenseFly by phone, I tired by skype and by email but I get no answer.
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