[GH85Carrera]

Drones are fun toys, but kinda expensive toys. You will fly your property a few times, and then your friends or relatives places. And then likely a park or two. And then the new wears off. Likely you can pick one up used.

We bought a drone just to play with, and see what it can do. We flew my house, at a 1/2 inch pixel resolution, and we had a Trimble survey unit here we rented for a particular project. I used the Trimble to shoot some points at my house, cracks in concrete, edges of sidewalks and such. I ran it all through the software we use for our aerial photography, and ended up with a 3D AutoCad, LAS file that I can then rotate, and look at from any angle and measure any part of, and measure the slope of the storm drainage across the back yard, or out to the street.

None of it is even close to certified or engineering grade as I did not spend a penny for a real survey, but I am not going to build anything. I did it just for fun. All cool, and now it just takes up a few gig on my RAID drive.

With our aerial photography shot from a Cessna 182 we usually don't get more than 2.5 inch pixel resolution, so a drone can get super high monster huge files. The is cool for a single house, but pointless on a 1/4 section or a few square mile survey as the files would be crazy silly huge. We have orthophoto images that are 30 gig in a compressed JPG2000 format now.