45 Days and Counting

A delayed version of the newsletter this week - apologies, I'm taking after my garbage and recycling collectors who always take that extra holiday day when they can.

From the field:

Drone practice. I purchased a little drone that can basically fit in the palm of my hand, and the controls of it are very similar to the big guys. I was able to fly it for about 45-60 minutes this past week, and boy do I feel more confident now. This little guy is going to come in handy this summer as well, as it'll allow me to scout out fields that may be hard to see all of. It could also come in handy if we happen to lose connectivity to the drone and it goes down. We'll be able to pinpoint the location amongst the tall corn.

There are two more official drone trainings that I'm weaseling my way into (along with my pilots), so I do think we'll be ready to rock and roll by the time mid-July arrives.

My trailer is officially being worked on now. I may be heading back to check out the progress in the next few days, but when I asked if it would be done by mid-June, he said if it takes that long, we've run into some real problems. All good news, as there's a lot more work that's going to go in to getting the finished product taken care of.

From the office:

The office work is starting to run a bit dry, until I'm on the road traveling without my computer. Then things really start to pick up. You know how that goes. The plan still remains to work as much as I can in the office until the end of June, and then at that point I'm guessing I'll need to shut it down completely and focus 100% on getting the trailer ready to go, the fields scouted/mapped, etc etc.

What I'm reading:

I'm glad I've been reading the drone forums, because there was a firmware update that went awry with the big boy drones. Had I not been looking at these daily, I would've blindly updated the firmware because I was prompted to, and it might've ended badly the first time I flew with the new update. There were stories of people who would use the "return to home" feature after the update, and the drone would fly in crazy patterns. A couple stories ended in the drone crashing into something - not great!

Thanks for hanging in - until next week!