News & Blog
Posts published in October 2026.
Every drone with GNSS onboard reports a position, but a standard consumer-grade chip in a drone typically holds accuracy around 1 to 3 metres, fine for keeping the aircraft where the pilot put it, not fine for recording where a specific photo was taken to survey-grade precision.
A standalone receiver works out its position from the code, a repeating digital pattern each satellite broadcasts, by timing how long it takes to arrive.
Photogrammetry needs enough overlap between consecutive photos, typically flown as a grid mission, for structure-from-motion software to triangulate matching points across multiple images and reconstruct the surface.
DJI Terra takes drone-captured imagery and LiDAR data and reconstructs it into an orthomosaic, a textured 3D mesh, a point cloud or a 3D Gaussian Splat, the reconstruction stage of the workflow.
DroneDeploy's platform includes its own flight-planning app, covering mission automation across supported drone brands rather than one manufacturer's aircraft.
Emlid's own positioning accuracy figure is actually tighter on paper, 7mm against the D-RTK 3's 1.0cm horizontal, though both sit well within normal survey and mapping tolerances once a fix is locked.
4T price has just dropped to £5,085.00 inc VAT, with an open box unit from £4,839.00.
DJI Terra imports flight logs and RTK/PPK data directly from DJI aircraft with no conversion step, since it's built by the same company as the hardware capturing the data.
