so ive been using a fixed wing for the past two seasons doing basic NDVI passes over our soy and corn fields and honestly its been decent for large acreage coverage but im starting to wonder if im missing stuff by not being able to hover and get a closer look at specific problem areas

the thing is we had some late season nitrogen stress last year that didnt show up clearly until it was pretty much too late to do anything about it and i keep thinking a multirotor with a better sensor payload and the ability to actually slow down over suspect areas might have caught it earlier

anyone running both? like do you keep the fixed wing for the big weekly passes and then use something like a matrice or even a mavic with a multispectral for followup? or did you just ditch the fixed wing entirely once you went multi

also curious what software people are using for the NDVI processing side of things, im on Pix4Dfields right now but its getting expensive and ive been eyeing Agrisoft or just running stuff through QGIS manually

we run both and honestly its the only setup that makes sense for anything over like 400 acres. fixed wing does the Monday morning pass, flags the zones, and then we go in with the P4 Multispectral on Thursday for a closer look at anything that stood out. the fixed wing on its own would miss stuff, the multirotor on its own would take forever. complementary tools basically

on the software thing ? dropped Pix4D last year and moved to DroneDeploy for the processing pipeline and its fine, not dramatically better but the agronomic report outputs are cleaner for sharing with the farm manager who doesnt want to look at raw index maps

honestly the nitrogen stress thing you mentioned is probably a timing and threshold issue more than a platform issue, NDVI just isnt that sensitive to early N stress in corn, you might want to look at adding a red edge band if you havent already, the P4 Multispectral does red edge and it makes a noticeable difference catching stress before it shows up in standard NDVI