The other week I missed out on a great opportunity. My bosses, boss had overseen the installation of a microwave link between two locations. This is where there’s two satellite dish like antennae installed pointing at one another over a big distance, say 50 km’s.
Similar to how a satellite works they transmit data to each other. Just like a satellite, they also need line of site to do this. You can’t have trees or buildings in the way, otherwise the signal strength plummets.
He ended up having to rent out a cherry picker and some men for thousands of dollars. All this just so they could get up to the same height and check the line of site between the two dishes!
I could have saved him all that time, money and effort by using my drone. It would have taken me 5 minutes to do! Unpack, fly up, snap some pictures and done. A quick and safe way to confirm that nothing was in the way.
This is the power of knowing about and using technology to its full potential!
Table of Contents
Drones
When most people think of drones they only see toys that maybe also take cool videos. Wrong!
Drones are already a huge, booming industry and for very good reasons. They not only are fun and get great photos and video’s but also enable completely new things or greatly reduce the cost of old things.
Today I wanted to get into the many different use cases that drones encompass. While I won’t be going deep into each of them, I want you to listen and think about how you might use this new technology. How can you use this in your everyday life? How might your personal business benefit from them? If you don’t have your own business, how might the business you work for benefit?
Imagine being able to save your company thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars! All just because you’re aware of what drones can do. So let’s look into all the different new possibilities.
Photography / Video
This one is obviously the most popular with very simple use cases such as filming TV or movies. No longer are expensive helicopters needed for those grand landscape shots. You can also now do much more with the camera flying inside car parks and then out into the world, something helicopters could never do.
Beyond the basic taking photos/videos drones are now being used to do surveying of assets. Maybe you need to regularly check towers for cracks or damage. Rather than climbing up them which takes time and money you can simply fly around them.
Easily inspect critical infrastructure cheaply and quickly. Source: dji.com
You can survey wind turbines, power lines, oil and gas infrastructure, pipelines and more. With both visual and thermal sensors you can get extremely quick and accurate information for a fraction of the cost. It also completely avoids the considerable health and safety risks.
Never Before Seen Insights
Maybe you work for an insurance company that does surveys of damaged properties. Overhead imagery, especially for large buildings, gives you a much better perspective. They can also show you completely new information that’s not visible from ground level.
You can also use drones for construction monitoring, crop monitoring, real estate photo’s, art projects and more. Whether you’re assessing a roof for damage or having a school of kids spell out something for an overhead shot there’s many applications.
Delivery
Using a drone to deliver your package is by no means new but there is a lot more to this than most realise. Sure, you could get a drone to deliver you food or your Amazon purchase but what about blood?
In Africa where there are many places that are hard to reach drones are already being used to air drop critical blood and other medical supplies. When it might take days just to get to a doctor having fresh blood delivered within 30 minutes via SMS is next level. They deliver over 500 packages per day, rain or shine, 24/7 at up to 75 km’s away!
If you have businesses that aren’t too far apart and make regular small sized deliveries drones could save you a lot of money and time. There’s also drones that “deliver” spray to crops. The DJI MG-1 is a purpose built drone for crop spraying.
The DJI MG-1. Source: dji.com
The DJI Agras MG-1 is an octocopter designed for precision variable rate application of liquid pesticides, fertilisers and herbicides, bringing new levels of efficiency and manageability to the agricultural sector
With a payload of 10 kg and a range of 7-10 Acres, the MG-1 is 40-60 times faster than manual spraying. It also has a Smart mode for automatic flying that can be easily planned with the press of a few buttons, without the need for mapping knowledge or other software.
Enabling New Possibilities
While most of what we’ve covered so far is simply making existing work cheaper and faster there are also entirely new use cases. One of the best examples is the ability to plant entire forests. This is what Drone Seed is soon going to do.
Our drone swarms can be equipped with a different module that uses compressed air to fire tree seeds into places they’ll grow well called “micro-sites.”
If you’re a council or other business that plants trees imagine the new possibilities this would enable. Entire parks and areas could be quickly and cheaply planted. They also do spraying of areas to fight back against invasive weeds and protect native trees. Maybe one day there will be “Jim’s Drones” instead of “Jim’s Gardening”!
So what does your business or work do currently that could be done quicker and cheaper with drones? Let us know in the comments below!
The benefits include: 1) How to get those silky smooth videos that everyone loves to watch, even if you're new 2) How to fly your drone, from taking off to the most advanced flight modes 3) Clear outlines of how to fly with step-by-step instructional demonstrations and more 4) Why flying indoors often results in new pilots crashing their drone 5) What other great 3rd party apps are out there to get the most out of your drone 6) A huge mistake many pilots make when storing their drone in the car and how to avoid it 7) How to do all of these things whilst flying safely and within your countries laws.
