u/redditnumptea

Software and hardware questions - to DJI or Not DJI

I have a Mini 5 Pro and Matrice 4E for building and site inspections.

I have also been tinkering with mapping on and off for a year since getting my Matrice.

Whilst on sites I do get asked if I can size up people sites and if I do land surveys.

I hired some professional land surveyors a while back to map out our boundary and was amazed at how varied their data was for the same site. Out of 5 of them only 2 were within .6m of one and other the rest were at least 6-9m out.

When I checked my Matrice maps of our site with a GIS program I noticed that my maps was very accurate, even without GCPs, one of the surveyors mapping points and exactly on the Inspire map they used as a base map.

So I am considering getting training and understanding this work more seriously and Buying a Rover and base station. I'd be lying to saying that budget is a not a factor. Annoyingly my Terra free license has run out so have resorted to WebODM.

I have yet to nail the right setting on the drone to make WebODM match my Terra output. I re-processed maps from Terra in Web ODM and they came out with holes and ghosting. It was even worse with Metashape with lots of swirling patterns.

I have read that GCPs are a critical element to drone mapping, I have never used them instead of using the local Ntrip RTK server via my remote.

I have looked at an Emlid and the DJI RTK-3. Any social media platform I have looked at the majority of posts suggest go for the Emlid. With a few people saying they use DJI RTK-3s.

The current price of the DJI D-RTK-3 is £1369 and the Emlid RS3 £2699.

Is there any reason to still go for the Emlid?

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u/redditnumptea — 1 day ago