Originally Posted By: capitolEven with a hunter mkiii with 60mm lens positive id might be 150-200 yards??? Theres no civilian drone thats going to lift that big of a payload.
The few thermal drone cameras that I found are in the 19mm range. Yes, that will tell you something is there, but getting close enough to get a PID is going to be an issue before theyre spooked.
I have been scanning with the Trijicon M300 19mm for several years now and I can tell a hog from a deer from several hundred yards in most cases. The 12 micron core makes the digital zoom much more usable when needed. Sounders of hogs in open fields are usually lower profile targets bunched together. The deer in the field have a higher profile unless they are bedded down and they don't usually bunch up to feed..... they are more spread out. Coyotes move differently than hogs and other vermin like skunks, armadillos and possums just look like small targets that move very little. Let me qualify this by saying I can "detect" well enough to make a decision as whether to start a stalk or not but i never shoot at any targets that I cannot ID with my Trijicon 35mm Mark III as a hog or coyote.
That being said, the M300 has a 640 core as apposed to the 320 Boson core. I have decided to go with a 13.8mm lens so that I can keep the drone at a further distance from the fields and hopefully still be able to see well enough to ID targets or at least ease the drone in close enough to get more pixels on the target when needed without spooking the hogs. The major issue right now is that the cotton and peanut crops are getting high enough to make locating the hogs very difficult.
I am also going to use a controllable gimbal for camera stabilization and a touchscreen so that I can control the Boson camera.....pan/tilt/zoom/change thermal color pallets, etc. I will try to wring out as much performance as I can from the Boson 320.
In any case the thermal will be used to see if there is anything out there that is viable enough to stalk for further evaluation. As of now there are a lot of unknowns but it should be a fun project and I will find out if the thermal drone setup is usable for my terrain and hunting style.
And..........I will be using 3 different screens when flying this rig so it may end up in the top of a tree before I kill my first hog with it.