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Our drone survey data took 6 days to process because of one dumb mistake
Last Tuesday we flew a 12 acre site near Nashville and the RTK corrections file was corrupted. Our processing software just kept failing on the point cloud alignment. After 4 days of troubleshooting I finally realized the base station file had a timestamp mismatch. Has anyone else had drone data take way too long just because of a small file error?
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joel_young29d ago
Did you check if your flight app was set to the right time zone before you started? Ive seen a few people trip up on that with RTK base stations near state lines. Tennessee splits eastern and central, and if youre close to the line the GNSS time can get confused with local settings. Next time try syncing all your gear to UTC before you launch to avoid the mismatch problem.
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holly_price29d ago
Good point about UTC sync. I always set everything to UTC and just convert times afterwards. But here's the thing even then the logs can still show weird timestamps if your receiver was picking up a base station on the other side of the time zone line. Another trick is to manually set your base station's position type in a known coordinate instead of relying on the average. That also cuts down on those weird time drift errors people report. Saves a ton of headache later when you're trying to match up image timestamps with ground control points. Most people don't realize how much of a mess local time conversions make in the raw data files.
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