so ive been doing cell tower and transmission line inspections for about 3 years now with a mix of the M30T and an older Inspire 2 setup and honestly the workflow has gotten way better but im still running into issues convincing clients that the drone data is as reliable as a climber going up there. like they'll accept the thermal imaging for hotspot detection on electrical components but the moment we're talking about structural crack analysis on concrete pylons or checking weld integrity on lattice towers they want a human eyeball on it.

anyone else dealing with this? im wondering if the answer is just higher res sensors or if theres some post processing pipeline i should be looking at. currently running pix4d for the photogrammetry stuff but thinking about testing something like dronedeply or even just doing manual oblique shots and stitching in lightroom for the close inspection stuff. the 48mp zoom on the M30T is honestly pretty solid for this but you still lose detail on tight crevices and recessed joints.

curious what others are doing for documentation standards ? are you delivering full 3d models or just annotated image sets? clients seem to want different things and i haven't landed on a consistent format yet

the climber vs drone argument is one i deal with constantly and honestly i dont think its ever going away completely, at least not for the structural stuff. what we ended up doing is positioning it as a first-pass screening tool rather than a full replacement ? you send the drone up, flag anything that looks even slightly off, then the climber only goes to the specific sections that need a closer look. saves time, saves money for the client, and it means the human verification is still there for the stuff that actually matters. once you frame it that way the pushback usually drops off a lot.

on the sensor side we switched to using a Zenmuse P1 for the high res photogrammetry work and the difference in crack detection capability vs the standard cameras is pretty significant. still not magic but you can actually pull usable data from surface deformation mapping that way. pix4d is fine but rc photo has been working better for us on the tower stuff specifically, something about how it handles the repetitive geometry.

yeah clients are weird about it. i did a water tower job last spring and they literally had a guy climb up after us to double check our thermal findings. which, fine, whatever, but we were literally showing them the exact same hotspot on three separate flights from different angles and they still wanted boots on it. think its partly a liability thing more than an actual trust in the technology issue. once someone signs off officially on your drone report being admissible for their insurance purposes it tends to get a lot smoother