The best solution for Cell Tower inspection jobs.

Cell site owners are reducing maintenance costs by half and maximizing efficiency by implementing drone inspections.

There are an estimated 3 to 4 million towers in operation around the world today. With the implementation of 5G, that number will only grow.

We, here at Scopito, stand ready to meet this growing market with tried and true solutions and years of industry experience. Outsourcing analytics and reporting save tower owners valuable time while providing better insights from the data captured by drones.

We service the largest Danish utility – have a look at their experience in this article.

How Cell towers are inspected using the traditional method.

Traditionally, cell tower inspection jobs have been carried out by a team of technical engineers on-site. Engineers would also need to be highly skilled and trained climbers (as well as EMT skills) in order to scale the tower and perform a visual inspection of components and/or capturing images for later analysis.

This method can be further complicated, depending on the types of imagery needed. Visual imagery is obviously imperative to analyzing the condition of the equipment. Issues such as rust, corrosion, or wear and tear on the mounting hardware are best identified from KML images.

But, Some of the equipment may exhibit problematic symptoms by overheating, in which case thermal cameras/sensors are needed to capture the anomaly.

Additional inspection concerns might be RF (radio frequency) levels. RF can emit high levels of radiation which can be dangerous to people who live and work near to these cell towers. RF inspection allows the cell tower owner to monitor the levels of radiation that are being emitted into the surrounding environment. 

This is equipment that needs to be carried up by the engineer, along with the expertise to operate sensors.

This procedure is not only time-intensive but also very costly. The safety measures needed to ensure that engineers have a support team in case of emergency, along with the technical team supporting the engineer, can add up to quite a number of people on the team.

It is not hard to see why cell tower owners have been eager to innovate.

How Cell towers are being inspected today, with drones.

The introduction of drones as part of a cell tower inspection job has put traditional methods to bed.

Drones eliminate a whole range of things, that is a real concern with traditional inspection methods:

• Risk
  Using drones to capture inspection imagery, [visual, thermal and RF] entirely alleviate any safety concerns to personnel climbing the tower. It also reduces the number of EMT manpower needed to support in case of emergency. Less personnel equals lower costs.
  
• Time
  Using drones drastically reduces the amount of on-site time needed for data acquisition. Less time onsite equals lower costs.
  
• Technical
  Using drones to capture Visual, Thermal and RF data alleviates the need to send out a Technical Engineer to perform the onsite inspection. This also frees up said Technical Engineers to work on other pertinent tasks. Again, fewer people in the field, equal lower costs.
  
• Data
  Using drones allows inspections to be perfectly programmed to collect consistent data, every time. Drone flights are planned to perform autonomously, with timed image capture at precise intervals. So when the data is analyzed, the analytics team has the exact data they need, at every inspection. Better, consistent data equals lower costs.
  
• Outsourcing
  A cell site owner won’t have to invest in a flight team or equipment to perform these inspections. In fact, the drone inspection, along with the analytics, can be outsourced at a fraction of the costs involved in building a team internally. This can also be a reduction in the cost of personnel needed to perform your cell tower inspection jobs, of course resulting in – you guessed it! – lower costs.

How to navigate any regulatory challenges.

In a standard cell tower inspection job, any regulatory concerns are minimal. With the flight being programmed and autonomous, the drone is always within “line of sight” and does not require any operations beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). Additionally, standard regulations allow flights around a tower to exceed 400 feet, in which case, drones are allowed to fly up to 400 feet above the tower. These parameters are far beyond the needed airspace for a typical tower inspection.

How to manage drone inspection data.

There is no question about the advantages of using drones in cell tower inspection jobs.

But, this approach also comes with (data management) challenges. Drones, especially when using several types of sensors, capture a massive amount of data. Getting usable insights from this data requires the proper “technical equipment”, or software, for the job.

To successfully scale up the operations of drones, cell tower owner must improve their data management procedures, or they will fail to harvest the many benefits of this new inspection method.

At the onset, the imagery (or data) captured during the inspection is essentially useless without proper processing and analytics. Manually sorting through the various types of images, for instance finding a specific angle of a specific component, can be a laborious, not to mention, time-consuming task. 

Inspection Data Management Software.

To improve this process and workflow, it has to be automated. Scopito offers such a solution that does just that. It organizes the data in a secured browser interface, where the imagery is geo-referenced, and easily navigable by the Technical Engineer analyzing the data.

In 2014 Ken Falk, current founder, and CEO at Scopito was doing his own drone inspections. He quickly discovered how time-consuming and inefficient the after-flight procedures were, and realized the need for innovation. 

With a past as a software engineer, Ken saw the possibilities in a proper data management system and started development immediately. 

Today Scopito is one of the world’s leading management systems for visual inspections, enabling customers to gain the full advantages of visual aerial inspections. 

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