I need to find a tree along a 3.5 mile path between 2 tower sites. It is blocking a wireless signal. There are bascially 4 patches of forest/trees along my route. I bought a drone specifically for the one purpose. In that process I pretty much screwed up, I was looking at the Phantom 2 Visions when Phantom 3 became available for a short pre-order wait. It does not support Groundstation or Waypoints. The Ground Station advertised on their website is referring to a possible 3rd party app in the future. There are several sections of trees and I am not sure how to handle my task to record a flight in a straight line. Any advise? I am just starting my test flights later today.
Hmm.....can't think of any at the moment. It would seem that another method other than a drone would work for this...shooting a laser or level from the top of one tower to the other, etc. Even if you had waypoints, you'd have a tough time finding the tree because you'd have to fly higher than the trees (to be safe), so judging the distance down might be difficult. I would not suggest using the P2V+ for this either due to lack of precision and reliability on the waypoints. Ideally - in a situation like this - you'd find someone with a more advanced waypoint machine who you could hire to do it. Still, I think the laser or something of that type might work better anyway. What do the big guys (At&T) do for their old point to point antennas? Thinking out loud here...but if you took a drone with a receiver in it and flew it straight up from one tower - at some height (not too far up) it would get the signal very strong and then you could draw a point from that height back to the other tower.....and maybe determine something? I guess you'd need to know the elevations all along the way as well as the canopy heights. @IceFyre13th any ideas here?
I have a signal now (through the trees) it is on the edge of working. Hoping off the second water tank will cost another $25k. There are several patches that are suspect tree patches on a ridge.
Laser from the tower to the next tower, then fly the drone to look for the spots the laser is hitting along the way. A green or blue high power laser ( http://www.wickedlasers.com/arctic ) would do as they have the power and range, be warned they burn stuff too. Fly at night or low light times and use a vehicle to follow the drone with ( ATV and get land owners permissions of course ).
The laser would have to mounted some sorts to the water tank location as the pole would not work. Not even sure if you can find the pole with binoculars, let alone aim a laser at it from 3.5 miles away. I am hoping to run the length in segments. The Pole location is in low lying area, first major tree line in the picture is on a 40ft elevation ridge from the pole. If I fly the drone from 150ft at the pole location, if it runs over a 40ft ridge does will it hold a elevation of 150ft" there, or 110ft? How does it account for trees?
Drone will use GPS for elevation, it will not "see" trees so if they are high your going to hit them. Its base elevation will be set from the launch site. Sounds like you need a helper, one person at the far pole to illuminate where it is, the other to aim the laser.....make sure both people are wearing laser protection goggles. Your going into $10,000 or more for a UAV that can scan for things in its way and maintain a flight path over that distance (big battery, big UAV, close to military spec electronics that have sonar altitude sensors). The easiest advice I can give you is to start thinking of the simplest ways to do what you need, trying to add in overly complicated UAV systems is not going to work for you......
