[zanderz]

I got a survey of my residential property, 1/2 acre on a rugged hillside, from a guy who used a drone equipped with lidar. It was $4,000, less than traditional methods, but it would be cool if a drone could just be dispatched from a nearby power pole instead.

[doctoboggan]

Hey, I just did this as well, but with 180 acres of very rugged ravines in rural Kentucky near red river gorge. I only paid $700 though.

My goal was to find all the old logging roads on the property, so I could revive them as hiking and 4x4 trails. This worked excellently as the resolution of the lidar was even better than he quoted and the roads stand out easily (especially after some face coloring based off of slope in blender).

Was your operator a licensed surveyor? Mine was definitely not and (politely) asked me to change my google review to remove any reference to the word "land survey" since he was not licensed to do that.

[zanderz]

Yes, this was needed for civil engineering and city permits to replace a retaining wall that holds my driveway up and (hopefully!) keeps it from sliding onto my neighbors fancy expensive house. All licensed and by the book. Quotes from other surveyors were 2x and more.

That's cool to discover entire roads you didn't know about. I would be hoping to discover an ancient city, like they did in central and South America with lidar. Are you sure there aren't any? Look again!

[wweissbluth]

That's super expensive. The majority of those costs are driven by the CapEx of the LiDAR unit. Ours is over $20k. In reality, though, it cost probably <$200 of operating expenses to collect that data.

The solution here is higher utilization of expensive LiDAR. So many pads, and few drones :D