been contracted to do a series of cell tower inspections for a telecom company, about 40 towers over the next few months. done a handful before but nothing at this scale and im starting to think my current approach is going to be too slow. right now im basically doing a manual orbit at a few different heights and then getting closer for specific components the client flags but its time consuming and the consistency between towers is kind of all over the place when i go back and compare the shots.

the other thing thats been annoying me is the magnetic interference near the antenna arrays is screwing with compass calibration on my M30T more than i expected. not dangerous exactly but it makes the bird a little twitchy in attitude hold and i end up spending more time than i should managing it manually. anyone else running into this and is there a standard procedure im missing or do you just deal with it. also curious if anyone has moved to a more automated mission profile for towers because the repeatability would really help with the documentation side of things.

the compass interference thing is pretty well documented with towers, especially anything above like 100ft with active antennas. what i do is calibrate well away from the structure obviously but also switch to ATTI mode intentionally for the close proximity passes because at least then youre not fighting the GPS trying to hold a position it cant accurately determine anyway. takes a bit more stick skill but once youre used to it the close inspection shots are actually more controllable. some guys i know doing this commercially use the skydio 2 for the autonomous stuff but the obstacle avoidance near metallic structures has its own headaches.

for workflow, the thing that helped me most was building a shot list template before the job and just running the same sequence on every tower. sounds obvious but it made the deliverables way more consistent and the client stopped asking why tower 14 had different angles than tower 3.

40 towers is a serious contract congrats on landing that. we did something similar last year and the thing nobody tells you about at scale is the data management becomes its own problem pretty fast. like youre generating hundreds of gigs across 40 sites and if your file naming convention isnt locked down from day one you will spend a painful amount of time trying to figure out which images belong to which tower. we lost maybe two days of sorting time because someone on the team wasnt following the folder structure. small thing but at that volume it matters.