On November 4th, 2025, DJI announced the latest upgrade in their aerial lidar sensors, the Zenmuse L3. But will it be a good sensor for surveyors? And should US surveyors even consider investing in a DJI product given all of the regulatory uncertainties in the world right now? Let’s dive into the details to find out.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: no true peer competitor exists today. Dollar for dollar, DJI remains the best overall platform for most commercial applications. There is no close second. This post explains why, how to think about the current regulatory environment, and what that means for surveyors, civil engineers, or really anyone who cares about safety, turnaround time, and profit.
Live Webinar: August 29, 2024 | 1:00 PM EDT
Join Aerotas CEO Logan Campbell for this 1-hour webinar he’ll help you plan and execute drone missions to get the best raw data out of your hardware.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:
plan missions properly to save your crew time in the field
execute missions effectively for the terrain you are surveying and the data you want
avoid common pitfalls that result in bad data, reflights, and wasted time
This article covers best practices for commercial drone operations, addressing regulatory hurdles, and gray areas, as well as strategies for handling onlookers and concerned parties. Despite the widespread discussions on drones, public perception remains sensitive. We'll explore approaches to encounters with the public, aiming to minimize disruption while staying within your rights as a drone operator.
The Phantom 4 RTK has been the workhorse drone for thousands of surveyors across the country. Released in 2018, it has been extremely popular among the surveying and mapping community for being simple to operate, impressively accurate, and reasonably priced. There are still tens of thousands of Phantom 4 RTKs being regularly used by businesses everywhere. But with the FAA’s new Remote ID rules coming into effect in less than 2 months, will they even be legal to fly still?
DJI recently announced their new M350 drone platform, the successor to their current flagship M300. It has a number of minor quality of life improvements over the M300, but is not a major or revolutionary upgrade over the current M300 platform. Notably, it does not add any new or improved surveying sensors to the M300 suite, and still relies on the existing L1 Lidar or P1 Photogrammetry sensor.
Once the M350 becomes available, Aerotas will do our standard review for all survey capable DJI hardware, and will publish the results as soon as they are available. Our initial analysis of the features and capabilities leads us to believe that this will be a minor upgrade over the M300, to the extent that it is likely not worth upgrading for existing M300 users.
As of this writing, the M350 has been announced, but there is no published pricing or release date, which we will provide as soon as it becomes available.
DJI recently released their new Inspire 3 drone, and we have had the chance to go through all of the information about their latest aircraft and camera system. It has many new and impressive features, with a very long list of advanced technological specifications. But is it any good for land surveying?
This month we are updating our CAD Standards and CAD templates as part of our ongoing process of improving the overall quality of our linework offerings. This article will go over some of the changes we will be making in this change, or you can view and download the full layer template at the below link.
The Mavic 3 Enterprise is DJI’s latest hardware release that is capable of performing survey grade mapping. It promises an advanced suite of capabilities and attachments to perform different tasks, but here we are specifically going to focus on the RTK enabled Mavic 3E, and how well it performs as a high accuracy surveying and mapping tool. And now that we have had a few weeks to fly, test, and process data from this drone, we are able to provide a full in-depth review.
![[Webinar] Flight Ops and Mission Planning: How to Collect the Best Drone Data](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54579091e4b05fc750f0d8ea/1723594632538-AMVGSGY3Q6I9ZA2UJ2JM/Surveyor%2Bflying%2Bdrone.png)
