Well over 6 months ago a good friend of mine let me borrow his DJI Spark after I had talked with him about possibly looking to buy a drone to use as a tool for my business (field surveys mostly). In that time I've flown the Spark for a little over 2 hours flight time and almost 50,000ft. It gave me the experience & confidence to move forward with the purchase of a Mavic 2 Pro for myself which was done during their year end sale at a pretty good discount! I took delivery on the 3rd and have flown the M2P for a total of 1.5hrs & 73,000ft distance traveled! Being able to scoot around at 30mph and nearly double the flight time with the M2P, you can cover a LOT more ground. And the fully stabilized gimbal on the M2P is a technological wonder!

Here are a few pictures I've taken (knocked down in resolution for sharing purposes):

My parents place & also the home-base for our drainage business

My in-laws house.

An example of a mostly pattern tiled field - not our work, but the field is just south of my house so I fly over it all the time.

I had just washed the truck the night before while I was down at the firehall so why not take a picture while it's all cleaned up! And yup, there I am!

Drone selfie in the hood of the Denali.


Any other drone pilots on the forum?

 

Very cool!

I got into quadcopters (yep, that's the word we use to use before the term "drone" got popular lol) years ago by diving into building up from scratch. This was around when DJI was first releasing the Phantom, and at the time DJI stuff was WAY out of my price range... I ended up ordering a bunch of parts from China, and whipped together a quad that had about a 2 1/2 foot arm span and used 12" rotors. It was terrifying lol and a major chore to fly with no GPS functions. But it got me started and it was a blast.













Later on a bought it a little companion, a Blade MQX. That thing was indestructible lol. Was much more maneuverable than the scratch built one.







I ended up getting out of the hobby for a while, but got drawn back in when the drone racing started to get popular. For some reason I found myself attracted to another cheap Chinese product and ended up buying a Walkera Runner 250. I just thought it looked cool lol. It was a super nimble and quick little thing compared to the last two. Had a lot of fun with the FPV setup I made for it.








And in the end, I just wanted something that I could take some good photos and video with. I ended up buying a DJI Phantom 3 second hand it it was unlike ANY of my past quads. SO much easier to fly, and the video was unbelievable compared to the Walkera's.

Oddly enough I don't have any photos of the thing... But I do have some videos that I've uploaded to Youtube over the years.

 

Very cool! I thought about building my own, but using it for work I just need something that will function properly and have a great quality camera. My end goal is to attempt to see if photogrammetric surveying is a viable tech for us to use. I haven't done a lot video wise with the M2P yet.

I still may end up building my own small FPV quad that doesn't have all of the fancy bells & whistles on it that can go a lot faster just to really play around with. The new CNC machine opens up a lot of possibilities for making my own frames out of carbon fiber. Just have to make a water bed to cut in to keep all of the chips contained. Carbon fiber dust can really mess you up!

I've had a few helicopters over the years that were fun, but quite difficult to fly. They were all fairly cheap (<$200) things with laggy controls which complicated matters, but still fun.

 

I think I have seen somebody over here in Europe use a drone with two outriggers and two cameras for stereo photography.

Might be a relatively cheap way to 3D model. The drone may even supply the GPS signal and GPX track info. Then you would only need heading or track information to precisely locate the pictures. Or the old way by marking ground features which can later be identified.