That’s right! You read that correctly! Front Range Community College has a couple of field-based GIS courses, specifically GPS class and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) class. This summer, we will be running the UAV course and are looking for some places to collect real-world imagery, which we will collect, process, and deliver. It would be great if we could fly somewhat local to Boulder County, though, we might be able to make the surrounding counties work. In the Spring Semester (January – May) we run a GPS class, which can collect data by hand with our own Trimble handheld units.
Important Items to Consider for UAV Flights this Summer:
- Flights will need to be on Friday mornings, at approximately 10 am, between June 10 and August 5
- We can collect in 3-band RGB (color imagery) and 5-band (color infrared), somewhere between 1-3 inch resolution
- The flights are planned and conducted by unlicensed students, though I’m fully licensed with the FAA and am technically the Pilot in Command (PIC), as is my Co-Instructor and our TA (student teaching assistant). We will always be on site during the flight, ready to take control, in accordance with the FAA rules.
- Our aircraft is registered with the FAA and has a tail number
- We will take care of filing a flight plan as part of the planning process.
- You will have upwards of 15-20 people on your land during the collection (students and teaching staff). We will collect one week and likely process the next, so it’s not instant (but it is free)
- We can provide a Certificate of Insurance, if needed.
- We use rotor wing aircraft, meaning the area can’t be crazy huge, like hundreds of acres. Area specifics will be discussed and planned for before we fully agree to collect the data
- The imagery and any products are yours to keep. These are Geospatial Science students, so data collection is only half the equation for us. Data processing is the other half.
- Nothing we fly will ever be considered legal boundaries. These are students, not professionals.
- We can post-process the data to an accuracy between 2 and 15 meters. Most likely on the lower end, but again, students.
If you have some land you’d like us to fly and collect non-legal boundaries based imagery/GIS products, please reach out! Surprisingly, finding places to fly and data to collect is one of the hardest things I do!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Jennifer Muha
Geospatial Sciences Program Lead
Jennifer.Muha@FrontRange.edu
Front Range Community College
Boulder County Campus
40°08’20.9"N 105°07’43.4"W
303.678.3801 – office
626.695.7941