first question is if a guy collects accurate clutter data, can he use it in any of the propagation tools we use?
second, and this is where you braniacs come in, what equipment would it take on a drone to collect this data? IIRC drone limit without FAA is something like 300 feet. would that even be tall enough to sweep a wide enough path that it wouldnt take 300 battery charges to do a square mile? I envision a course plotted drone trip that will fly over with a pilot car trailing to maintain the required operator LOS. If you think about how many miles youve put on verifying link paths over the years, its not really a prohibitive thing. CBRS and SAS is whats driving this query, but general propagation anomalies creates quite a pickle that better accuracy/resolution clutter accuracy would alleviate. Please tell me there is already a consortium thats built out a clutter standard with a clutter submission mechanism, that would completely tickle me silly. I also dont know the impact to the propagation back ends as you increase the resolution of the data. Im assuming the SAS administrators are running something a little beefier than Radio Mobile. I could see this being a lucrative niche market, if there were a way around the drone operator licensing requirements (though that cost is pretty minimal). Basically a company builds up a small fleet of drones, outfitted with the appropriate gear. You create an account, input your coverage area (or any region) that you want high resolution data for. they reprogram the course and ship it to you (after collecting the upfront payment, deposit, and massive liability release) they provide you with a road course to drive while the drone does its thing, anticipate points of retrieval for recharge, etc. when its all done, you stick it in the box and ship it back. would be cooler if the whole thing was transported back and forth by amazon drones. If I had a guarantee that the collected data would be useful to the company, into radio mobile, link planner, towercoverage, and SAS administrators, its something i could see a fair price tag of 3-10k on it for our coverage area, and no farmers blasted it out of the sky. we use clutter data now thats antiquated so it would come with the understanding that photosynthesis and bulldozers impact accuracy from the minute its collected. maybe this data is already out there and i dont know?
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