Looking to augment my cousins pipeline inspection business. Any insight on what platform is best to invest in? I can see the DJI stated capabilities, just looking for some user experience. Are you happy with the Matrice 300? Issues, if any?
Thanks!
S

I purchased an M300RTK with a P1 to do environmental surveys, primarily bird colony nesting islands, coming up from various Phantoms

All I can say is that the M300RTK has been an extremely repeatable platform.

Whatever it does, it does it exactly the same way every time. No drama, no worries, no missed images.

After coming from Phantom 3 Pros with "effective" battery capacity in the 12 to 15 minute range, although I'm still learning, this thing is still happy with 45 minute flights.

I have yet to find out how far the control or video signals go, because I've never had the slightest glitch or come off the signal pegs at our ranges of up to 2000 meters.

I have completed mapping missions with clear photos in up to 35mph winds. The wind was blowing from the side, so it was heeled over at 30 degrees or more, with gusts, but the line of images mapped perfectly straight and stitched perfectly.

The DJI Pilot software is powerful and very easy to use. It's so easy that I now don't fear going out to a location I haven't studied online before, whipping up a quick mission, flying it (flawlessly, as always), then leaving with high confidence I won't need to come back.

The images from the 43 megapixel P1 are phenomenal compared to anything from any previous version of Phantoms. We're now counting eggs when we used to be guessing at nests.

With all that happiness out of the way, all the things I don't like about the M300/P1 are silly software/firmware decisions that I hope will be fixed someday..

On mapping missions with a P1, the gimbal slews down to -90 at the "start" point, which is the first internal waypoint of the mission grid, and does a single autofocus attempt. That's all you get. If that point happened to be over water, like you're flying islands, every picture in that entire mission set will be out of focus, but you really can't tell until you pack everything up, get back on the boat, go back to shore, and look at the images on a full size computer screen. If your one chance at autofocus failed, you're in for another boat ride. There are workarounds in terms of fooling the mapping algorithm such that the start point is over land, or at least shore, but since some of our islands change shape from what's shown in the satellite image, that's not always a clean kill. Lately I've taken to halting the mission once the M300 gets clearly over land, then pausing it in mid-air, uploading the same mission again, and resuming it from the halted location. This means the only pictures you're risking are the ones before the halt.

Just silly

Some of our island are within various FAA or DJI no fly zones, and that has been an ordeal. Some nice soul in DJI support finally either felt sorry for me or got tired of my emails and unlocked a zone we often need for 2 years. That in itself is amazing because you can see the zone on the controller, and the M300 understands internally its good-to-go for that zone until 2023. The unlocking procedure requires an SMS text message back to your cell phone, but although the same procedure has worked fine for Phantoms for many years, the text messages from China don't come through, and you can't unlock the zone.  DJI blames my phone, my carrier, at one point the number of GPS satellites the M300 was seeing, everything. There is a workaround to another DJI system that actually calls the phone and states the unlock key in a human voice, so that's the one we use now. When I pointed out to DJI that the phone number was obviously right on the one that offers the voice, they quite responding to emails on that thread.

The screen on the controller is silly small compared to a tablet, but it is very easily readable in bright sunlight. The problem there is that since there is no DJI supported editing process for DJI PILOT missions other than the tiny screen itself, you spend a lot of time trying to make minute adjustments to paths or zones that would be simple on a computer or larger touch screen. I have tried UGCS, which seems to work well, but the hassle of either having a computer in the field or not being able to make any changes to the planned missions finally got to me.

DJI still won't allow you to see or download any mission log files in any way, shape or form. I am working on something that requires the direction the camera was facing, Yaw, in addition to the GPS location and altitude. They feel your data is proprietary to them. The only work around I know requires a subscription service where you upload the log file from the controller in binary format, then download a CSV with the log entries in the microsecond time frame, which includes the yaw value I need.

The fact that DJI still tries to hide the results of log files makes think they are still somewhat surprised these things every actually land as expected.

That's disconcerting, but in the case of the M300, it's coming home, every time.