I’m a 16 year old kid trying to start a drone business, and I’m not sure what drone to buy. Real estate photography, roof inspections, and mapping are some services I’ll be providing. I’m looking into buying a Mavic Air 2S, but I wanted suggestions. My budget is $1400, but preferably below 1K.
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I hope people will respond to your question. There are a lot of great people on this site. Most are always willing to help.
Congratulations Owen, that’s exciting! Starting off with residential work is the way to go. Before you hop into mapping for development make sure you take the time to learn about the construction and Surveying processes. If you are eventually wanting to make highly accurate maps you will need to save for some additional equipment. I have an Air 2S and think it is a very good drone to start with. It does general media very well and is one of the only consumer level drones right now that has good mapping support. The Air 3S is out and would be a better choice but we need to wait and see if they release the SDK so DroneDeploy and Dronelink can add mapping support.
Back to the accurate mapping scenario the Air 2S is capable of turning out good maps but for them to be anywhere accurate enough for reliable contours and materials volumetrics you will need the ability to set control points on the ground which will require a GNSS receiver of some sort. Most people go with the Emlid receivers but there are others out there. Emlid has a sale right now but that are $2,000+ so put it in your budget for the future. Once you get comfortable and ready to make really accurate cm-level maps you will need to get a drone that is PPK/RTK capable, but you will need the GNSS receiver to operate it at full potential regardless so that would be the order I would suggest.