Drones are a major tool for agriculture, recognized by the World Bank and advocacy organizations around the world as a way of securing the global food supply.  In Asian countries and elsewhere, spraying drones are widely used to apply fertilizer, pesticides and other products for more efficient farming.  How are spraying drones bringing new opportunities to rural America? Taylor Moreland of AgriSpray Drones,  speaking from DJI AirWorks , believes spraying drones like DJI’s new Agras model are can help more families farm together and give young people a way to stay in farming communities. Growing up on a family farm, agriculture is a big part of Taylor Moreland’s life – but he always knew that in order to make a reasonable income, he wasn’t going to be able to immediately return to the family farm.  After graduating from college, he started a seed business, and that’s when he first was introduced to drones, using the Phantom 4 for general crop scouting.  Now, Mor...

It’s time to fly! You’ve waited for this moment. Through the agonizing period of charging those new batteries and you’ve glanced at the manual for at least a whole minute. Waiting, watching, as those four little lights finally stop blinking in succession. OK, there’s the controller, done! Tick tock, tick tock, there’s the goggles battery, yes, alright, almost there. Tick Tock, Tick Tock, there it is. Oh yeah! The DJI Avata and its assorted gear are ready. You grab it all up and head outside. You’re nearly shaking with happy anticipation. You’ve read all the reviews, and you’ve probably watched a hundred hours of YouTube videos. Just for this moment. You don your goggles, and after a moment of fumbling, you realize: you’re not to the goggle-wearing part just yet. No, you need to power everything on while you’re still able to see. Innocent mistake. OK, now we’re cooking. All three units are juiced up, and you can now put those glorious goggles over your eyes. The view in the screen is ju...

Now that the DJI Mini 3 has been out for a few months, there have been a few problems both discovered and fixed. This drone has proved to be one of the best consumer drones for both price and performance. However, like every piece of technology, there are bound to be some problems. On the bright side, these problems are isolated in most cases, and there are workarounds if they happen to you. This article will highlight eight of the most common problems pilots have encountered and walk you through the best ways to solve the problem. One of the largest issues, when the drone first came out, was the limited transmission range in certain regions. This is one of the issues that has been addressed by DJI, and fixes have been coming in recent firmware updates. A few other problems that will be discussed in this article are low-quality videos/images, the inability to fly sideways, the failure of the smart controller to download a current map, and long charging times. Each problem has fixes and...

With the holiday season quickly approaching, more and more first-time drone owners are joining the community. Included in these would be the new DJI Mini 3 Pro owners group. There is nothing more daunting for new users than getting a first-time electronic device or piece of equipment and having to figure out the correct sequence of inputs to power on/off that device. With that said, we’ll be going through the steps needed to turn on/off the Mini 3 Pro, as well as the RC-N1 and DJI Pro remote controllers. Preparing the Mini 3 Pro to Fly (Charging the Batteries) Although many of us want to open the Mini 3 Pro box up and fly immediately, there is a very important step that must be taken prior to flying for the first time. That would be charging all of the batteries. RC-N1 and DJI RC Batteries When unboxing the included remote controller, whether either the RC-N1 or DJI RC, although it will have some charge to it, generally about 25-50%, it is important to charge the RC before first-time u...

Jurgita Lapienytė  Chief Editor of Cybernews writes about their discovery of a 54Gb Aeroscope database held on an AWS server in America. That’s 90 million flights logged. We knew Aeroscope was out in the wild, able to track most brands and used by several companies but did we know that the data from them became joined up? Was this data from a single company with 66 Aeroscopes 53 of them in the USA? I know one of you knows all the details of this, that’s the beauty of the sUAS News reader! A good friend of sUAS News @d0tslash would love a copy of the data if you have access and Jurgita would like to know who the data belongs to. This foreshadows data sets to come that will be collated by RID systems. RID is much much much cheaper and easier to decode. It’s an open standard. For many years aviation regulators ruled the roost when it came to knowing where many aircraft were. They owned the big expensive massive infrastructure required, radar systems. The first primary, is just a sign...

Jeremy Wood, CC BY-SA 2.0 Powering Up Your Drone Program — Overcoming Implementation Challenges DroneNerds is a top drone reseller, offering a wide variety of services and support.  They’ve helped enterprise clients from many different verticals starting a drone program– and they’ve published a new ebook based on a real world case study supporting clients to help new entrants implement a successful enterprise drone program in the energy space.  The following is a DroneNerds guest post by Senior Marketing Manager, Ana Coronel.  The full eBook, How to Set Up a Successful Drone Program in the Energy Industry,  can be downloaded here . Continue reading below, or listen: Drones are transforming the way the world operates, bringing efficiency, convenience, and automation into industries that would otherwise spend hundreds of hours gathering data needed for business analysis and crucial decisions. As specialized drones begin to offer advanced solutions for their respective...

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers dropped a drone into the devastating winds of Hurricane Ian, marking the use of a new tool that can give greatly improved measurements of the turbulent boundary layer of a hurricane at lower altitudes. The drone was an ALTIUS (Agile-Launched, Tactically Integrated Unmanned System) from AREA-I, which was acquired by Anduril Industries in 2021. The ALTIUS didn’t carry any cutting-edge equipment — the same sensors used in dropsondes, except for a downward-looking infrared sensor that measured sea surface temperature — but it allowed more time for measurements, which can be critically important. An Altius demonstration model with a NOAA WP-3D Orion Hurricane Hunter, similar to the one that deployed it, at NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida, during the second UAS flight test window on May 25. CREDIT: NOAA/AOC “We’re not measuring differently, we’re just getting more data,” said Joseph Cione, the lead meteorologi...