Comment by marklit
18 hours ago
What sort of budget does your org support?
I had to look into ~19 imagery firms for some telco work in Canada last year.
There are private jets that can capture 10cm imagery and can pick the ideal weather window to fly in.
There are also firms that fly balloons 20 - 80 KM off the ground that can capture 4cm imagery.
The space is pretty busy.
We're volunteer driven and currently rely on personal donations, so we're scrappy. We could probably justify somewhere in the region of $10k/yr. The jets/balloon angle is interesting, thanks - hadn't occurred to me, and I'll search through what's out there.
See if you can negotiate reselling the imagery they sell you. It might be hard to get agreement with this as the vendor will have you both as a customer and compeditor but if you pull it off, you could recoup your costs and then some. For a few weeks, no one else in the private sector will have the freshness and/or quality of imagery you do.
> The jets/balloon angle is interesting
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what about drones? Probably would have to get permits most likely, but still might be cheaper than alternatives (although balloons are hard to beat when it comes to costs, not always reusable though).
We do use a drone when we know of a site where deforestation has taken place. The gap we're trying to fill is early detection of forest intervention, so that we can alert appropriate agencies (who are generally under-resourced) and get an inspection to take place while activity is ongoing.
Drones (and helicopters) do have their market as well. A lot of engineering firms I saw would go with one of these two, depending on the situation.
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Really busy, from satellite constellation tasking to planet and co basemaps to the sentinel family to aerial imagery to helicopters, drones and even blimps.
They all have their unique combination of cost, resolution, area coverage, revisit rate and spectral modes. Quite difficult sometimes to find a good fit for the underlying problem. What‘s clear is that resolution and revisit rate correlate with cost. Shit‘s expensive.