Welcome to Our Blog
As this is our inaugural blog posting, a little bit about our company…We’re Vertical Aspect – a small company of UAV Mapping experts – based out of San Antonio, while performing service work in Texas and surrounding regions.
We’re Vertical Aspect – a small company of UAV Mapping experts – based out of San Antonio, while performing service work in Texas and surrounding states, and providing UAV mapping training across the U.S.
Our mission is to helping individual professionals and companies rapidly integrate drone mapping, through our consulting, individualized training and sales of select hardware and software products.
Our Backgrounds
The background and personal experiences of our staff has directly enabled us to provide UAV mapping. I have an extensive military flight background as a retired Navy helicopter pilot, I’ve run four major IT programs for Lockheed Martin and have been involved in UAV aircraft for half a decade. My associate and lead technical expert, Mark Paulson, is a Registered Professional Land Surveyor in Texas, a private pilot and he has extensive fixed wing drone flight experience. Even with all our prior related knowledge, the path that we forged in building up our knowledge level has not necessarily been an easy one.
Guess, Buy, Fly, Crash, Fix – repeat as necessary
We engaged in a lot of trial and error, in researching, buying the most advanced products (for the time) that were available. We studied by scouring numerous forums and tutorials – hung out with R/C experts, took various courses, asked innumerable questions. We flew countless training, test and project flights. We burned the midnight oil learning the intricacies of various related post-processing software, served as beta team members, contributed our experience in helping to make the software better.
Along the way, we suffered the occasional crash, fixed the equipment, learned from our mistakes and repeated the cycle. We didn’t always guess right on the equipment we needed, and spent a lot more than we really needed to. We saw the failures and backtracking as integral to our method of self-teaching and we learned from them – rarely making the same mistake twice.
Through this evolution, we realized that there was a real need to share our knowledge and there was a real need for others to be able to take a much more direct, more efficient and less expensive path towards being able to generate survey-grade projects.
Taking Off
Thus, Vertical Aspect was launched, in late 2014. We learned even more about the aircraft and associated software, and became a reseller of select products that we felt were the best-in-value. When we felt we had something worth offering to others, we took on our first clients.
Our Clients
We have a wide range of clients – from those who are totally new to drones and we start them from scratch. Others, are current surveyors, engineers or contractors who have a mapping background and see drones as a great tool to add to their toolbox. Others are R/C (remote control) hobbyists who want to turn their passion for remote flight into a business. Where we saw resistance to the technology at first, with the rapid migration of technology and the public’s exposure to drones, we now see acceptance and eagerness to take advantage of everything this new field has to offer.
How We Can Help
- Assess your needs and provide the tools, training and support
- Save you Time & Money in Getting Started
- Help you pick the right equipment the first time
- Rapidly help you learn all levels of the mapping workflow
- Tailor your training needs to your goals and level of expertise
- Serve as a resource following your initial training to assist you in your projects or as an advocate to your clients
“We’re consultants and trainers first – salesmen only if your needs require it…”
Full Service Projects
If you prefer to outsource your drone mapping needs – we can do it all for you – from flight planning through final product.
A great option for those wanting either wanting to let someone else take on this effort, or to experience the entire process before making the decision to in-source
Significantly easier to legally conduct Commercial Drone Operations
Where we initially saw hesitation for clients to use drones commercially due to the legal and regulatory issues (FAA Part 333 requiring a manned pilot license), we now have a much more realistic path towards legally flying commercially via the new FAA Part 107 pilot certification process.
So, we welcome you to join us as we share our knowledge in the world of UAV mapping. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and we’ll lay a lot of it out for you in upcoming blog articles, for our goal is that you’ll see Vertical Aspect as a resource for learning an overview of the process and the associated technology, and use the experience gained to help keep you out of the Guess, Buy, Fly, Crash and Fix cycle.
Topics for Future Blog Posts:
Here’s a high level of the general path we intend to take – though not necessarily in order.
Overview
- Business Uses for Drones
- Major Components Needed
- How to Learn UAV Mapping
- Why not just use Google Earth?
Technology
- The Workflow
- Outputs and their Uses
- Survey Grade Accuracy vs. A Pretty Picture
- Mapping Theory
- Desktop vs. Online post-processing
- Outputs explained – Sorting out the acronym soup of DSM, DTM, LAS Ortho, topo, etc.
Taking it a Step Further
- More complex projects
- Taking on more of the workflow
How To…
- Ground Control Points
- Adjusting altitudes for DJI Products
- Joining projects together
- Common Errors and How Not to Make Them
Additional Categories
- Reader’s Choice – You Pick the Topic
- The Business of Mapping
- Reviews of the products we use
- Showcasing our Projects
- Pertinent Industry News
- Sharing Info from our speeches and presentations
We’ll help break it down… If you’re either ready to start learning, perfect your existing knowledge, or just want someone else to do the entire workload for you, contact us to get started or to find out more… We look forward to working with you.
Jeffrey R. Campbell
Managing Partner
Vertical Aspect, LLC