Hi, I’m new here and tried to find an answer but I was unable to.
I’ve been flying with drone deploy for some time and I’m very impressed with the results.
One thing I’ve been trying to find out is if it’s possible to set the flight altitude, for the flight plan calculation, independent of the drone starting point.
Usually I choose a higher vantage point to keep the drone in LOS and avoid obstacles that could interfere with radio communications.
In many cases the point where the drone takes off is already near the flight altitude I want for the surveying flight.
If I set a Flight Altitude of 10m (from the starting point) and I’m already 20m higher than the surface I want to capture, the flight plan will be calculated assuming I’m 10m above ground and the drone will capture much more images then needed and the imagens will overlap much more than intended.
I think setting the flight altitude independent of the take off and travel to the first waypoint should be very simple, but I’m unable to do it.
There should be a way to avoid over-capture, without manually calculate the parameters or playing with the manual settings and guess the appropriate overlap amount.
Hi @Jnx! With the recent launch of version 4.2 of the app it was reported that terrain awareness would be possible. I have some questions in on that and will report back here if that is truly the case. This will solve the requirement to take off from a position that creates the AGL desired.
I took a look into the new version (4.2) and revised some older flight plans with terrain awareness on, but did not tested yet.
On the interface I found it hard to review, I think the altitude information window in front of the flight plan does not help much.
It would be nice to selected one leg from the flight plan and review the profile, individually.
Anyway, considering that I’m in south of Europe (Portugal) I did not believe that the altitude data from Nasa or Mapbox are up-to-date and/or accurate enough, in rural areas in my country.
I still think an option that would allow to set an altitude for the flight plan, independent of the starting point altitude, would be very helpful.
I tried the Terrain Awareness this morning and it worked well. I tried it on a site that had moderate elevation change to be safe, but I was at the high point and could tell that the drone was raising and lowering accordingly. One suggestion would be to make sure that you have at least a 20ft buffer as this is the deviation that you could get with the combined accuracies of the drone and the DEM that was used for the terrain. This is mostly important for those of you that like to fly at very low altitudes. I typically fly at 200ft and one of the first things I do on a new site is go find the tallest obstruction in the flight path and make sure I have 150ft of clearance. This also ensures that I get good overlaps in those areas.
With this addition I am closing this thread as it is no longer relevant. Please visit the new Terrain Awareness thread.