so ive been doing cell tower inspections the old way for about 6 years now, you know, climbers, rigging, the whole deal. company i work for just started pushing us to integrate drone inspections into the workflow and honestly im on the fence about it.

we picked up a Matrice 300 RTK with the H20T payload and yeah the thermal + zoom combo is pretty solid for spotting corrosion or antenna misalignment from a safe distance. but the issue is youre still sending a climber up most of the time anyway because the FAA stuff, the client documentation requirements, and just the fact that some things you really cant diagnose properly from the air.

curious if anyone else is doing this professionally ? like are you finding the drone actually cuts down on climb time meaningfully or is it mostly just a nice visual report add-on that justifies the invoice? not complaining, the M300 has been solid, just trying to figure out where this actually fits into a real inspection workflow vs where its kinda fluff.

we run a similar setup, M300 with the H20T and added the Zenmuse L1 for some jobs where the client wants point cloud data of the structure. honestly for initial triage it has cut down our climb hours noticeably ? like if were doing a sweep of 12 towers in a day for a carrier audit, the drone lets us triage which ones actually need a climber immediately vs which ones can wait. that alone pays for the gear over a season.

but yeah you're right that it doesnt replace the climb, it just makes the climbs more targeted. the documentation angle is real too, clients love the video deliverables even if technically the climber is still doing the actual hands-on work. i think of it as a pre-inspection tool more than a replacement, which is maybe not what the sales pitch was lol.

kind of in a different sector but we do powerline inspections and the thermal on the H20T is genuinely useful for spotting hotspots on insulators and connectors, things you really wouldnt catch with rgb alone. so i imagine for towers the thermal would help with similar passive component issues. dont know enough about the climb requirement side of your workflow to comment on that part but the sensor is legit