thinking about getting a drone on payday

I'm in the drone business with drones in the 300k to 2 million range. I have thought about buying one of the cool $1000 HD drones on the market for fun, but I have not done it because I can't answer any of these questions...

1. What do I want to do with it. It seems a after a short while it would get kind of boring if I don't have a purpose.
a. Maybe hike a lot and you want aerial views of your hiking areas.
b. You are hunting Big Foot
c. You have acreage and want to us a drone to check all is good on a schedule.
d. You ride mountain bikes/ski/boat etc a good deal and you want a drone to follow you using GPSes for aerial recordings for your sport
e. You are in the real estate business, and use it as a marketing tool.
f. You want to start a small company where you sell HD footage to others for their needs and wants. I thought about a company that puts a tracker on a skier and when the skier heads down the mountain a drones follows them and records their event, for a small fee of course.

Personally I could not answer any of these for myself so I do not have a drone as I think within a short period of time the novelty would wear off.

a reply to: penroc3

I got into drone consulting via it being my hobby.
When I introduced drones to underground mining - the mine I work at, it started a lot of buzz in the mining industry. Word travels fast in it.

The Canadian institute for Mining asked me to be a speaker at one of their events,describing the possibilities of drones and the advancement in safety underground with them.
Their events are for owners of mines, chairmen and CEOs. So it wasn’t just a bunch of roughnecks I was going to be talking to. It was the money that ran those mines, as my audience.
I met the right people at the event and helped another mine set up their drone program.
All the while I was working on a project for my mine for self docking and automated flight underground.
I submitted my idea to the UAE Drones For Good contest.
At the time ( 4-5 years ago) the tech wasn’t there yet for my idea, but Flyabilty - who won the contest with the GimBall, reached out to me.
They said they loved my vision and that it was exactly the type of external eyes and thought they wanted helping them.
So they drafted up an NDA, brought me into what they were doing and it went from there.

Since then I have worked with Flyabilty, DJI, Event38, Emersent and most recently Skyeton.

Skyeton is pretty exciting because I’ve never worked with drones that have weapon payload capability.
Because I’ve attached my name to this thread, I cannot go into anymore detail about Skyeton, nor any details not currently available on the market by any of the above companies.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Cool drone. That is what I call a responsible and effective cage, to protect everyone and the environment.

This is still the tip of the iceberg of drone usage. The technology is finding many useful features and capabilities for them. They can do more than just buzz around and take pictures.

a reply to: Macenroe82

very cool, im jealous!!

if you happen to find any FLIR units lying around send it my was(i kid of course).

im not sure if you can answer this but i assume you are in Canada, have places outside North America like Arab or eastern bloc type places wanted a piece of the places you work with?

the reason i ask, on all the sites i've been looking at they have all sorts of legal statements saying that the tech can not be exported outside Canada/America.

im not sure if you heard about the attempted assassination on a South American political leader with a few consumer grade drones. There is also a video someone made with a glock attached to a small drone that apparently was very accurate and even corrected for the recoil.

if a person had any nefarious goals drones offer a way to surveil or even harm someone remotely.

do you think there will be a time when drones are regulated to a point like guns are(in the US)?

granted im just getting into this area but it seems no one(so far aws i have seen) is really talking about all the nasty things someone could do with this tech.

a reply to: penroc3

Dji are good drones, a tad expensive to be a first drone, but not a horrible one to start off with.

I have the AR parrot elite 2.0 it was $300 has 1080 hd fro the cam and a standard bottom view.

It gets about 20 mins of flight and video with the stock battery.

Most drones are GPS capable, and if that's available for the model you want, get it.

It's worth the cost to have a drone that can be tracked if it goes haywire.

The god can also used for auto flight pathing.

On the down side of ownership is the people that won't leave you alone while flying. Either asking questions or threatening. Yup at the beach in the winter with ice as far as I could film a woman called the police and said I was filming her. She was a quarter mile away and was in my video but so far away. luckily the police know me and I have filmed for their training and the local fire department training.

a reply to: mikell

Time for someone to engineer the turd dropping attachment.
If you are going to get sued, might as well make it a more justified endeavor.