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A Drones View Over A Goldfield


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Very nice,was talking about drones with a few mates of mine at work who took the plunge...........

One thing that striked me in Oz is the 1000s and 1000s of holes into the Goldfield( i was in Vic) ,i could almost imagine the picks and showel at work.......and now not a sound almost eerie in some place ,with a feeling of been watched....

Never in all my travels i had this sensation,anyway back to the drones .may get one soon to prospect the beaches,or the foreshore in London

 

RR

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The Porcupine Ridge Rd area is reputed to have produced some larger gold. Surprisingly little historical information compared to other areas. A very interesting area full of promise still. Lots of bullets on the hillside above the river, rabbits still hopping around. Met a very large brown snake who didn't stop to say hello, thank goodness..  I'll be spending some more time in the area. The mineral water at the spring tasted awful.. not going back for seconds.

Ballarat Hill is quite distinct and even more so from the air. Pity the larger portion being on private property. Took me a while to work out the boundaries but once you figure it out there is still a decent area to detect. Moving south there is less private land and things open right up.

The lack of a 4x4 has hampered my efforts to some extent but I've got a decent pair of boots that compensates. I think I left a few bits of my car on the Wewak Track. The sound of my car crunching and scraping on rocks is equal to fingernails on a chalk board, just more expensive.

The situation with the bridge is a disgrace and symbolic in so many ways with local governments priorities not reflecting community needs. Years ago I drove over the bridge on a few occasions and it always looked as if it was ready to give way..

I've just spent a bit of time in Eastern Victoria and the scrub was so thick it was challenging to swing the detector.. with a Red Bellied Blacksnake for every hundred meters of creek.. Vaughan is a much easier place to prospect despite the occasional brown..

 

 

Porcupine Ridge.JPG

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9 hours ago, jasong said:

I have a Mavic 2 Zoom that I use in the Rockies and Arizona. It's been a real time saver scouting prospect, mines, and outcrop up in the mountains. I can see which have features that interest me, it's high enough resolution to tell the difference between ore piles and waste piles. Resolution is good enough that I can pretty easily identify outcrops. The zoom is actually surprisingly good too. The height limitation sucks around the high mountains, but I find a high spot to launch and combined with the zoom I've been able to see whatever I've sought.

It hasn't been as useful to me in the desert flats. But I did use it to track thieves down, and you can see 2-tracks left by trespassers offroading around fences and see where they came from, or easily monitor thug compounds from the air, stuff like that. 

I've flown it almost 5 miles each way, so it's possible to cover quite a lot of land and distance as long as you have a line of sight between the control and drone (another reason I find a high spot to launch). 

Hey Jason there are drone hacks that can remove that height limitation.  I only have the Mavic pro that’s fully hackable. I’m not sure about full hack-ability on the 2.

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Just a bit of information on the Vaughan area as shown on old and new maps. The drone footage was over Ballarat Hill with the maps showing the same area.

Vaughan.JPG

Fryers Ck GF30.jpg

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On 4/19/2021 at 6:43 AM, afreakofnature said:

Hey Jason there are drone hacks that can remove that height limitation.  I only have the Mavic pro that’s fully hackable. I’m not sure about full hack-ability on the 2.

Personally I wouldn’t use any of the hack programs, they’ve been known to be unstable and some have lost drones with them.  

When flying in the US, and some other countries,  one good thing is you are allowed to fly it 400’ directly above the terrain it is above or next to, thus you can be in a valley below a peak that’s 5000’ above you and still be allowed to fly 5400’ above your head as long as the drone is within 400’ of the summit or the side of the mountain.  I find this rule actually allows me to fly it a very hilly area with terrain over 400 feet above me without any issues. On a Mavic 2 pro, you just have to accept the elevation limit warning if you’re going above 400 feet, no need to hack it- it will let you go as high as 500 m above you.

One thing to watch for though is you can’t see what’s on the other side of a hill or ridge if you are below it, and sometimes aircraft like to fly close to them, so being able to see what’s around on both sides is important!

65360DB9-800B-4A30-B6C4-05DF4531FA3B.thumb.jpeg.bd290517280ab06c54b943905bfd3280.jpeg

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That may be a rule, but there is an absolute height restriction of 500m from launching point on the Mavic 2 firmware, so it's not possible to stay 400ft above the ground when flying up mountains. Unless I'm missing some setting that disables it, but I tried and couldn't find one, thus I have to find the highest possible point to launch. The drone does not appear to have any capability to measure height above surface, only altitude from original launching point (it probably uses an altimeter, doesn't measure distance above surfaces). It doesn't care if there is a mountain under you increasing height as the drone increases height, it only cares about how high from your launching point the drone is now.

So, I can be 20ft above the surface of the ground the entire flight travelling up a mountain, and then hit the height restriction halfway up and it won't let me fly any higher to get to the top even though I'm still only 20ft above the ground. 1600ft isn't much, that's a hill not a mountain, so it requires finding a high enough point to launch from, which ends up cutting into the time saved by using the drone.

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36 minutes ago, jasong said:

That may be a rule, but there is an absolute height restriction of 500m from launching point on the Mavic 2 firmware, so it's not possible to stay 400ft above the ground when flying up mountains. Unless I'm missing some setting that disables it, but I tried and couldn't find one, thus I have to find the highest possible point to launch. The drone does not appear to have any capability to measure height above surface, only altitude from original launching point (it probably uses an altimeter, doesn't measure distance above surfaces). It doesn't care if there is a mountain under you increasing height as the drone increases height, it only cares about how high from your launching point the drone is now.

So, I can be 20ft above the surface of the ground the entire flight travelling up a mountain, and then hit the height restriction halfway up and it won't let me fly any higher to get to the top even though I'm still only 20ft above the ground. 1600ft isn't much, that's a hill not a mountain, so it requires finding a high enough point to launch from, which ends up cutting into the time saved by using the drone.

Yup this is absolutely correct GotAU and DJI owners have complained about this a lot.  Hack it up...at your own risk ofcourse. 😁

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1 hour ago, jasong said:

That may be a rule, but there is an absolute height restriction of 500m from launching point on the Mavic 2 firmware, so it's not possible to stay 400ft above the ground when flying up mountains. Unless I'm missing some setting that disables it, but I tried and couldn't find one, thus I have to find the highest possible point to launch. The drone does not appear to have any capability to measure height above surface, only altitude from original launching point (it probably uses an altimeter, doesn't measure distance above surfaces). It doesn't care if there is a mountain under you increasing height as the drone increases height, it only cares about how high from your launching point the drone is now.

So, I can be 20ft above the surface of the ground the entire flight travelling up a mountain, and then hit the height restriction halfway up and it won't let me fly any higher to get to the top even though I'm still only 20ft above the ground. 1600ft isn't much, that's a hill not a mountain, so it requires finding a high enough point to launch from, which ends up cutting into the time saved by using the drone.

Besides using a hacked firmware update to beat the 500m limit, there’s another way you can do it but it’s unlikely unless you have a legitimate reason. DJ I can unlock it remotely, apparently:

https://forum.dji.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=196674&mobile=2

 

🤔 What if you started the drone up in a barometric chamber type box or could cover the barometer port and give it a slight vacuum before it took off, would that fake it into thinking it actually took off at a higher altitude?

It would be nice to not have to worry about the 500 m limit even if you are climbing above a 1600’ “hill” 🙂

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I probably will try that hack at some point. It seems easier than trying to fool the altimeter. Anyways, just wanted to comment on that since the question was asked about using a drone in the mountains in AZ and the Rockies, that's the main issue I had. 

In AZ I've been able to find high enough launch points, but a few times I've had to use the optical zoom after hitting the restriction. In the Rockies it turns into a real limitation though where mountains with prospects can be 4000ft+ prominence above the highest launch point you can drive to without climbing the mountain.

When I bought a DJI Phantom like 9 years ago there wasn't really any mapping programs available, and I bought it to do my own high res aerial mapping for a Geocommunicator replacement website I made at the time (now defunct) called Virtual Prospector, with the idea of providing up to date high res aerials of the popular goldfield areas, for free. But I gave up on it because hand stitching the maps together and then georeferencing them manually was beyond time consuming, plus the distance limitations made it incredibly limiting (even with tons of aftermarket mods I barely got 1 mile in wide open Rye Patch), and at the time I had to hand attach a GoPro to the drone and couldn't get rid of the fisheye'ing entirely which made accurate georeferencing impossible even with days worth of hand correcting in photoshop. But I see a post that there are mapping software available now, and with the longer flight distances of these recent drones and awesomely high res cameras built in today, someone may try to do that again. Like Mylandmatters. Hint hint. :wink:

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