so ive been doing cell tower and transmission line inspections for about two years now mostly with a M300 and the H20T and it works fine but my client is starting to push for more detailed structural data and someone on their end mentioned lidar. im trying to figure out if thats actually useful for this kind of work or if its one of those things that sounds impressive in a proposal but doesnt really add anything over good photogrammetry.

the towers we're doing are mostly lattice steel, some monopoles, heights ranging from like 60m to maybe 140m. the H20T zoom handles visual pretty well and the thermal picks up hotspots on electrical components which is the main deliverable anyway. but now theyre asking about deflection analysis and corrosion mapping and im not sure if that requires point cloud data or if you can get there with dense photogrammetry outputs from something like reality capture.

anyone actually running lidar payloads on tower work specifically, not just general construction scanning. curious what the real world difference looks like in the data

we ran an L1 on a few guyed towers last year for a structural engineering firm and honestly for deflection the point cloud was useful but probably not in the way you'd expect. the engineers wanted to compare against the original design drawings and check for any lean or twist in the main legs. photogrammetry could probably get you close but the lidar density on thin steel members like the diagonal bracing is just cleaner, less noise on edges. that said the L1 on a M300 is a pretty chunky setup and flight planning around a lattice tower gets annoying because of the multipath interference messing with positioning near the structure.

for corrosion mapping though i'd honestly still say visual with a good zoom lens and the right lighting angle is more actionable for the guys writing the inspection reports. lidar won't tell you if the galvanization is compromised, you need visual or thermal for that. so it depends what the structural team actually needs to sign off on their analysis.

not tower specific but we do a lot of large industrial chimney and flare stack inspections and ran into the same question. ended up sticking with the H20T because the client workflow was already built around the thermal outputs and introducing point cloud data meant they'd have to retrain their inspection team on new software. sometimes the technically better solution creates more friction than its worth depending on whos consuming the data on the other end.