been getting more requests lately to do cell tower and transmission structure inspections and im trying to figure out what the actual pros are using for close-up work on these things. ive done a few jobs with my M3E but getting tight enough to see weld integrity or corrosion on the steel without the proximity alert going crazy is kind of a nightmare, and the wind up high near those structures is no joke either.

seen some people mention the Skydio 2 for this kind of thing because of the obstacle avoidance being better for tight spots but im not sure if the camera resolution is actually good enough for documentation that an engineer is going to rely on. also the whole BVLOS thing is a factor on taller structures, some of these towers im looking at are 300+ feet and depending on where you are visually tracking becomes a real issue.

not looking for a full enterprise sales pitch just curious what people are actually using in the field for this kind of work, what camera setups, any particular flight planning software, and whether youre doing manual flight or automated on these

we run a couple different platforms depending on the job. for general tower condition surveys the M3E with the wide and tele combo works fine honestly, you learn to manage the proximity stuff by just flying in atti mode in some situations which yeah its a bit more hands on but gives you the control you need. the real issue i keep running into is vibration and wind buffeting when youre close to the structure, even a light breeze does weird things when you're trying to hold a hover 2 feet from a steel leg at 250 feet up.

for anything where the engineer actually needs to see corrosion or crack detail we've started using a separate zoom pass with the Zenmuse H20T on a Matrice 300 which is obviously a bigger investment but the 23x optical zoom means you can get the detail from a safer distance. the thermal channel is also useful for finding issues in electrical components on transmission structures. Skydio has its place for autonomous orbit stuff but for the really close inspection work id want manual control personally.

slightly off topic but has anyone dealt with the RF interference from active cell towers messing with their control signal? i did one inspection on a co-located tower with like 6 different carrier arrays and my controller was doing some really weird stuff. ended up having to move the ground station way further out and it was a pain. just wondering if theres a better way to handle that cause i imagine its a pretty common problem with this kind of work