Subcontractor asked me about my drone mapping setup yesterday

I was checking elevations on a 3 acre lot near Austin and one of the concrete guys came over. He asked why I was using a DJI Mavic 3 instead of just renting a total station for the day. Made me realize I'd been overcomplicating site prep for smaller jobs. Anyone else had a trade teach them a simpler way to work?

3 comments

3 Comments

harperp2410h ago

... but is it really that complicated in the first place? A 3 acre lot isn't exactly a massive job. I've seen guys pull out total stations for tiny residential surveys and it always struck me as overkill. The drone might seem like the simpler tool but you still have to process the data and deal with battery swaps and everything. If the concrete guy is asking about it, odds are he's seen a dozen drone setups this year alone around here. Just feels like there's a lot of noise about "workflow efficiency" when half the time a tape measure and a level would do.

corah759h ago

And that's exactly the thing @shane_bell, you see these guys roll up with all this gear and half the time they're still trying to figure out how to get the drone to talk to their tablet while the concrete's already being poured. The real cost isn't the drone itself, it's the hours of fiddling and re-flying when you could have just had a guy with a stick walk the lot in twenty minutes. All this talk about workflow efficiency but I've never seen a drone that can beat an old hand with a tape when it comes to just getting the damn job done.

shane_bell9h ago

Man I had a buddy who tried the drone route for a small lot like that and spent more time fighting with software updates than actually measuring. You're right @harperp24, sometimes the old school tape and level just gets it done faster.