so ive been going back and forth on this for a few months now. we do cell tower and transmission line inspections for a utility contractor and right now we're still sending climbers up which is obviously expensive and slower than id like. i've been pushing to add a drone workflow but my boss keeps asking me to justify the cost and the waiver process and honestly im not sure i have a great answer yet.

the thing is we already own a mavic 3 enterprise for some site documentation stuff so its not like we're starting from scratch. but for actual close-up tower inspections i keep reading that you really need something with a good zoom or thermal, and the M3E thermal combo is decent but ive seen people say the zoom on the tele lens isnt quite enough for really tight component inspection from a safe standoff distance. anyone actually running a regular inspection workflow on towers? curious what platform youre using and whether the ROI actually penciled out compared to climbers.

we switched to drone-only inspections for most of our monopole work about two years ago and honestly the hardest part wasnt the gear or even the 107 stuff, it was convincing the clients that the image quality was good enough to replace a climber report. once we did a side by side comparison on a test tower the conversation basically ended itself.

for platform we went with the M3T for most jobs, the thermal is genuinely useful for finding heating issues on connectors and the tele lens gets you close enough for most structural checks if you know how to fly the pattern correctly. the one thing id say is you absolutely need to have a consistent flight pattern documented and repeatable ? that's what the client actually wants to see, not just pretty photos. if you can show them you're hitting the same inspection points every time with the same alt and angles they trust it a lot more.

the waiver thing is only an issue if you're working inside the 400ft surface area rule near the base which yeah some tower sites require a bit of coordination but its not as bad as people make it sound. most of our sites are rural anyway.

what software are you using to manage the inspection outputs? thats the part im stuck on, we have decent imagery but stitching it into something a client can actually navigate and annotate findings on has been kind of a mess. tried a couple platforms and nothing feels quite right yet