Hi, No, I have never done telecomms inspections - but I can absolutely see that Litchi would be a great tool for the job. Of course Litchi scores because it creates a precisely repeatable flight - and for you this means that, if you do it right first time, the company will be back asking for annual inspections for years to come. Kerching! Kerching!
In recent years I have used Litchi to monitor wheat and maze seed trials on a farm. The 20 or so seed varieties were sown in strips. I used Litchi to fly the drone over the crops at 2-4 M agl and repeat passes at 20M agl. Repeating the flight at fortnightly intervals from the time that the seed sprouted through to harvest time allowed the crop development to be monitored and comparisons to be made between the individual varieties. This data coupled with the weighed yield for each variety enabled farmers to choose which variety performed best and therefore offered the best financial returns.
When setting up programming the Litchi flight if you have elevation data for the area embedded in the mapping it will simply things because you can select to apply it automatically. If like me you aren't lucky enough to have the elevation data available in the mapping then you will need to carefully check the map's contour lines and build this info into your programming. I am currently flying repeatedly around a chalk quarry and a woodland that is under renovation. Both of these sites have 50M elevation changes from the launch site site so care is needed.
I would suggest that you have a good look at the mapping available for the area that the inspections are needed to assess the level of difficulty. Don't worry about not having experience of Litchi. A few hours spent watching YouTube tutorials and you will be ready to programme and fly your first Litchi flights. Be careful to review the programming very carefully including RTH settings. To be safer I create Litchi missions and save them then open the mission again another day and review it again then to spot any silly mistakes. I prefer to set a final waypoint close to the launch site so that I can retake control and perform a manual catch landing. My top tip, if you do go down the Litchi route, is to download Litchi Virtual Mission as an extension for your web browser. I mainly use Opera browser and because there wasn't a specific extension for Opera I chose the Chrome Litchi Virtual Mission and it works perfectly in Opera. Also download Google Earth Pro. Then in the Litchi Hub plan a mission and choose Missions/ Export as VLM. This will download a virtual mission and when you click the download it will open the mission that you have created but in Google Earth Pro where you can run the 3D mission and see on the screen a very good virtual representation of the video stream that you will actually obtain when flying the mission in the real world. This is a very good double check of your created mission for the route, elevation, gimbal angle before committing your precious drone to an autonomous flight.
All the best, Martin
