so ive been doing cell tower inspections for about 3 years now, mostly with climbers and we just started trialing drones for the close-up visual stuff. running a Matrice 300 with the Zenmuse H20T and honestly the thermal + zoom combo is pretty solid for spotting antenna cable degradation and connector corrosion but im still not totally sold that it replaces a climber for everything.

the thing is our clients are pushing hard to cut climb costs and the insurance side of it obviously makes drone-first make sense on paper. but there's stuff you just cant catch without someone actually putting hands on the hardware. loose hardware, weatherproofing tape lifting, that kind of thing. the drone gets you 80% of the way there maybe.

anyone else doing telecom tower work with drones? curious what payloads people are using and whether youre doing full facade scans or just targeting specific sections based on initial visual pass. also wondering if anyone has dealt with pushback from clients who want the drone report to replace the full structural inspection report entirely, because thats a headache we keep running into

yeah we went through exactly this debate about 18 months ago. ended up landing on a hybrid workflow where the drone does the initial condition assessment and flags areas of interest, then we only send climbers to the sections that actually need hands-on attention. cut climb time by probably 60% on most jobs and the clients are happy because the overall invoice is lower even with the drone operation cost on top.

we're on the M300 as well but using the H20 rather than the H20T, thermal hasn't been a priority for our telecom clients yet though i can see the argument for it on older towers with aging coax runs. the zoom on the H20 is more than enough to read serial numbers on antennas from a safe hover distance which is usually what they actually care about for asset management purposes.

on the report thing - we had one client try to get us to stamp a drone-only report as a structural inspection and we just straight up refused. that's a liability mess waiting to happen. drone visual!= structural assessment, full stop. if they want that they need an engineer on site regardless of what the drone images look like.

bit off topic but has anyone tried the Elios 3 for confined space stuff on these towers? i know its designed more for inside tanks and ducts but i've seen some people using it around the base structures and equipment shelters. probably overkill for standard tower work but curious if anyone's played with it in an industrial context like this