I see that DART DRONES is offering a course for a Drone Deploy workshop for $1,490. I want to know from Professional Mappers out there if this is a course they would recommend or if not what would you recommend?
That seems awfully spendy for something I taught myself. I would take that money and purchase a P4P. I'll tell you why in a minute.
I need to find work for my
Inspire 2 and Believer with a Sony a6000.
That's WAY too much drone for mapping. If you get a 800 acre job, you'll be flying all day back-to-back missions for 8 hours. Do you have that many batteries? I find that with 7 batteries and a 3-battery charger (100+ watts per battery), I can stay aloft perpetually. But that's with a P4P. The flight time with a
Inspire 2 with an A6000 is going to be either significantly less, OR the batteries are going to take a lot longer to charge due to their higher capacity.
If the course is worth a salt, the first thing they're going to tell you is to dump that
I2 and trade it in for a P4P. The P4P has a mechanical shutter, which is a deal-maker in the mapping game. Plus you don't want to have $10,000 flying 2 miles out to get photos. God forbid something should happen to the drone, that's a LOT of money down the toilet. I imagine the A6000 has a mechanical shutter, as well, yes?
So I thought mapping would be good to get into as I have used Drone Deploy before and enjoyed the process.
Is Drone Deploy terrain aware? If not, that's the wrong program. Are you working with a survey company? If not, you may run into legal troubles if you use the word "map." There's TONS of stuff to know that I wonder if this school is going to teach you all this??
I need to be able to get clients for the service and thought of networking at the Dart Drone Course
I can't say either way. But I can tell you this. Any company that focuses on the drone and the software are giving you only 25% of the picture at best. My HIGHEST recommendation is to shop yourself to survey companies. The work-flow with them is pretty straight forward.
* Receive .kml file of the area with pinpoints where the GCP's are going to lay out.
* Coordinate shoot time/date on a day that they can lay out GCP's.
* Make sure weather permits.
* Get GSD spec's (1 inch/pixel is pretty standard).
* Get overlap spec's (75/75 is pretty standard).
* Send a screen shot of your mapping mission for final approval.
* Meet the surveyor on site and fly your mission(s).
* Deliver photos to surveyor for rendering orthophoto map.
* Make sure to cache maps before leaving your house (Internet access) (some sites are out of cell range, so don't count on hot spot).
* Make sure your drone is unimpeded by random, erroneous DJI "tests" and/or "EULA agreements." If you're not VERY DILIGENT, this crap WILL bite you in the field.
I've spent a couple years getting the work flow down.
Good luck!
D