I have been a maber for Drone SAR for Lost Dogs for many years now, and use to use me various interations of ther Mavic top carry out a visual search of an area to help the gound teams. Reasonable successfull, but on the longer term searches, the need for a thermal drone became a must. After using the Mavic 2 Enterprise drones, I took the step and aquired a Mavic 3 Thermal. This opened up and whole new way to search and was very successfull. With the change in the UK claaes this year, the M3T became a legacy unit so I knew that I would have to replace it in the forseeable future.
I noted that another member of the lost Dogs group was looking spoecifically for a M3T so took the step and moved my M3T on and aquired a Matrice 4T as its replacement. Being UK2 I can use it near people (5 meters in low speed), so the few times there has been a need to operate near other people, its has been fine in that mode, but as most of the imte we operate in open Countyside, the thing is a great tool. Its not IP rated, but neither is the operator, but appart from that its a very effective tool. The bigger controller with the bigger screen makes operations much easier when on task. The nigh mode for the optical camera is als a great help as that gets around the resolution limits of the thermal camera, so I use the thermal and optical camers side by side.
This si the norma view when on a tasking, Thermal on the left, and Optical on the right.
A white taget on the thermal shows above the background so you can use the optical camera to identify the target, in this case a pidgeon
This is all while being able to stand off from the target area so not disturbing anything on the ground.
Great bit of kit and a real bonus to any SAR operations.