background: i work for a small infrastructure services company and we've been subcontracted to start doing visual inspections on cell towers and some water towers in our region. been flying commercially for about 3 years but this is a different beast than what im used to. the RF interference near active towers is no joke ? had my mavic enterprise acting genuinely weird on my first attempt, compass was going nuts and i had it in atti mode before i even realized what was happening.

ended up having to request a temporary shutdown window on the equipment which is a whole process with the carrier. some towers we can do fine from a distance, others you basically have to get the thing within a few meters to see the mount hardware and connection points properly and thats where it gets sketchy.

currently looking at whether its worth getting a skydio 2+ for the obstacle avoidance in tight spaces or if the RF issue is just going to make that worse since skydio relies so heavily on the vision system rather than gps. anyone dealt with this specifically or have a setup that actually works reliably for tower work

the skydio RF thing is a real concern, i wouldnt fly one near an active array unless you absolutely have to. the visual odometry helps with the gps dropout issue but you're right that the underlying compute and sensors can still get weird from strong electromagnetic fields. a guy i know who does a lot of this kind of work swears by the autel evo 2 pro for tower inspections, says its been more resistant to interference than the DJI stuff in his experience but i honestly couldnt tell you why, might just be anecdotal.

the shutdown window approach is the right call for close-in work imo. yeah its a hassle to coordinate but its the only way to actually trust what your aircraft is doing when youre that close to the hardware. ive heard of guys just winging it and the liability exposure if something goes wrong seems insane to me

we do water towers pretty regularly and dont have much of the RF problem obivously but the proximity stuff is still an issue just from a physical standpoint ? wind shear off the structure can be brutal, especially the cylindrical ones. had a close call once where the air coming off the curved surface just dumped the aircraft sideways faster than i could react. fly further out than you think you need to and use a good zoom camera if you can, the mavic 3T or something with real optical zoom so you arent having to get stupid close just to see whats going on with the hardware. saves a lot of the sketchy flying