so ive been running a senseFly eBee for a couple seasons now doing NDVI mapping for a few local farms and honestly its been decent but the workflow is getting annoying. fixed wing is great for covering big acreage fast but the launch and landing situation on irregular fields with ditches and windbreaks is just... a headache every single time. lost a wingtip last fall because of it.

been looking seriously at going multirotor, probably something in the Matrice 300 range with an L1 or P1 payload, maybe the Autel Evo Max if i want to save some money. the thing is i know ill lose some coverage speed and flight time but im wondering if the flexibility makes up for it in actual field conditions. anyone whos made a similar switch have thoughts? do you end up flying more missions or fewer because the setup is easier?

also not really interested in the DJI Agras side of things yet, just scouting for now. spraying is a whole other conversation i dont want to start yet

made almost exactly this switch two years ago, was running an eBee X and moved to an M300 with P1. coverage speed does take a hit, theres no way around that, but what i didnt expect was how much more i was actually flying because setup went from a 20 minute production to just pulling it out and going. ended up covering more total acres across the season just because the barrier to launching was so much lower. terrain following on the multirotor also makes a real difference when youre doing stuff in hilly ground, the eBee always wanted to fly flat and you end up with weird GSD variation in rolling fields.

the L1 is really nice if you want lidar alongside the RGB/multispectral but if its pure crop scouting the P1 with the multispectral back is probably the better value. just my experience though, depends a lot on your field sizes. if youre regularly doing 500+ acre blocks in one go the fixed wing math still works out.

dont sleep on the Autel option tbh. i know everyone defaults to DJI for the enterprise stuff but the Evo Max 4T has been rock solid for me and the thermal + RGB combo is actually really useful for early stress detection before it shows up in NDVI. saved one grower a whole lot of headache catching an irrigation issue mid July that wouldve been invisible on a standard multispectral pass.

that said im only doing maybe 200-300 acres per client so i cant really speak to scaling it up