so ive been doing tower work for about 6 years now, mostly climbing, and my company is starting to push us toward drone inspections for the initial site assessments before we send anyone up. makes sense in theory but im trying to figure out if the ROI is actually there once you factor in part 107, the equipment, and the time it takes to process all the footage afterward.

right now we're looking at maybe a Mavic 3 Enterprise or the M30T if we want thermal, and i honestly cant decide if the thermal is worth the extra cost for tower work specifically. like for roofing or solar i get it, heat mapping is obvious. but for structural steel and antenna mounts i feel like visual RGB is probably fine 90% of the time? unless someone here has actual experience spotting corrosion or hardware issues with thermal that changed their mind.

also curious if anyone is doing the actual report generation in house or outsourcing that part. the automated reporting software seems like another money sink but manually going through 4k footage frame by frame sounds like a nightmare at scale.

thermal on towers is more useful than you'd think but probably not for the reasons you'd expect. we dont really use it for corrosion, youre right that RGB is fine for that with a good zoom lens. where thermal actually earns its keep is checking whether equipment is running hot ? like active antenna units, base station hardware, anything that can have a thermal signature when its failing. had a job last year where thermal flagged a sector antenna running way hotter than its neighbors and sure enough there was a internal component issue. saved the client from a full outage probably.

on the reporting side we do it in house with Scopito, its not cheap but its way better than manual review. the time savings alone justified it within like 3 months for us.

part 107 isnt that bad honestly, i stressed about it way more than i needed to. the cert itself is like $175 and if you already know airspace and weather stuff from being around aviation it clicks pretty fast. the gear cost is the real hurdle yeah. we started with just a Mavic 3 classic before committing to enterprise stuff and it was fine for getting the workflow down before dropping serious money.