been doing cell tower and transmission line work for about a year now, mostly subcontracting through a telecom company. the actual flying part is pretty dialed in at this point ? running an M30T with radiometric thermal and RGB together which has been great for spotting connection issues and hotspots on equipment. but im hitting a wall with the actual deliverable side of things

the clients keep asking for different stuff every job, one guy wants a full Pix4D point cloud, the next wants just a KMZ with photo waypoints dropped in, and one company recently asked for something that would integrate with their asset management system which i had literally never heard of before. starting to think i need to pick one workflow and just standardize it rather than trying to be everything to everyone

also curious how people are handling the RF exposure stuff near active antennas ? ive been keeping the drone at least 3m from any active panel but i honestly dont know if thats based on anything real or if i just made that number up at some point. the signal interference on the video link gets sketchy sometimes too which is annoying when youre trying to do close inspection passes

the RF thing is something i actually looked into pretty hard after getting weird compass errors near a dense antenna cluster on a monopole. theres no single standard that applies across all frequencies and power levels which is kind of frustrating ? the 3m rule youre using is pretty common in the field but its more of an informal industry thing than anything OSHA or the FCC has actually put in writing for UAS specifically. i know some guys who will ask the carrier to power down the sector facing them during inspection but that basically never happens in practice

on the deliverable standardization question ? i just started putting a one pager in my initial quote that listed exactly what formats i provide and told clients thats what they get. lost one job over it but it saved me probably 20 hours of reformatting garbage on other projects so worth it

the asset management integration thing is a rabbit hole, some of those enterprise systems use their own proprietary tagging and honestly unless youre getting consistent volume from that client i wouldnt even bother trying to native-integrate. just export to whatever common format they accept (usually CSV with coordinates and photo links) and let their IT team figure out the import. not your problem to solve their internal software issues