so ive been doing cell tower and transmission line inspections for about two years now and i keep going back and forth on this. started with just a mavic 3 enterprise and the tele lens and that got me pretty far but clients keep asking about thermal and im not sure if its actually useful for towers or if its more of a roofing/solar thing

like for a guyed tower checking for rust, loose hardware, bent members ? i dont really see what thermal adds over a good zoom. you can see mechanical damage just fine at 7x or whatever. but then i had a job last month where the client wanted to check for heat buildup in the coax connectors at the top and i was kind of wishing i had the radiometric option

anyone doing this regularly? do you bother carrying the thermal payload or is it mostly dead weight for structural steel stuff

thermal on towers is pretty situational honestly. for straight structural inspection ? corrosion, physical damage, bird nests in the equipment ? zoom is fine and honestly better because you get actual detail. thermal wont show you a cracked weld it'll just show you temperature variance which on a steel tower in the sun is mostly just noise anyway

that said for anything electrical ? connectors, junction boxes, antenna feedlines ? yeah radiometric thermal is the right tool. ive caught a hot splice on a fiber run that visually looked completely fine. so if your clients are doing any kind of electrical or RF equipment checks alongside structural its worth having. i run an M30T and just switch payloads depending on what the scope says

bit off topic but are you doing confined approach on these towers or staying back and using the zoom? i ask because ive had clients push back on the data quality when im shooting from 50ft away even with good zoom. some of them want the drone basically in the tower face which makes me nervous near all that steel and the RF interference near active antennas is no joke