so ive been doing cell tower inspections manually for about 6 years and our company is finally looking at bringing drones into the workflow. we already have a guy with a part 107 so the cert side is handled but honestly im not sure what setup makes the most sense for close proximity work around towers. the RF environment up there is no joke and ive had people tell me their compass goes completely haywire near active antennas.

right now we're looking at the M3E or possibly renting time on an M300 with the H20T but the budget conversation is ongoing. main use case is visual documentation of mounts, cable runs, coax condition, rust spots on the structure itself. not thermal, just RGB for now. anyone running inspections on telecom infrastructure regularly and have opinions on which setups actually hold up when you're 3 feet from a panel antenna that's definitely transmitting

yeah the RF interference thing is real but honestly overstated for most setups in my experience. ive done maybe 200+ tower inspections in the last two years with an M300 and the main thing is just dont rely on GPS hold when you're close in. switch to atti mode or use a system that lets you fly manual and just be deliberate about it. the M300 handles it better than most because of the redundant IMU setup but even then you want your operator to actually know what they're doing and not just rely on the automated stuff.

H20T is overkill if you're just doing RGB documentation. the zoom on the H20 non-thermal is genuinely excellent for picking up corrosion and cable damage from a safe standoff distance. that's kind of the whole point ? you dont need to be 3 feet away if your zoom is good enough. we do most of our documentation from like 8-10 feet out and the images are more than sufficient for the inspection reports.

we tried the M3E for a few tower jobs and it's fine but the zoom range is limiting for taller structures. works ok for stuff under like 150ft but anything taller and you're spending a lot of time repositioning. also ran into one situation where the occusync kept dropping near a particularly dense antenna cluster and that was not fun. ended up switching to a spotter system with the controller on a different freq band but that added complexity we werent prepared for that day lol