Baseline Mapping

Developing a map that shows your work area with details of its condition at the time of your flight takes software that will control the drone.  The software does most of the heavy lifting.  You need to mark the area of interest on the screen of whatever software you have chosen or which has come with your drone. 

The image above shows a flight plan (called “mowing the lawn”) for an area of saltmarsh at Old Town Hill in Newbury, Mass. The launch point is the purple balloon, the photo starting point is a small green dot in the upper left of the grid and the ending point is the red dot in the lower right. The white vertices are handles for moving the corners of your study area, those white dots in the middle of a side of the polygon are for adding new vertices. The blue line is the flight path. You can adjust this angle by grabbing the green handle on the large green circle and move your mouse or finger.  Once you set up your polygon, flight speed (in the side bar), your altitude above ground, % overlap and the model of your drone, the software will figure out when the drone will take a photo and when to “return to home” when the battery gets low.  

I find that Dronelink, which I use now, is not entirely intuitive.  The green circle in the middle of the study area is the way you can open up editing of your flight parameters. 

If you are working from your smartphone or controller screen, you may find it frustrating to set up your flight parameters.  I open up the software on my desktop computer and plan my flights on the big screen in advance of going to the site  The account is synchronized with my iPhone and the app will have the preplanned flight in the directory of projects.

When you are ready to fly make sure you consider all that is mentioned on the “Standard Operating Procedures” page and anything you know that I did not include.