A few weeks ago I was camping in the desert with a buddy. He was sighting in a weapon at 100 yards using a mountain as a backstop. The shooting range was pretty obvious with high visibility paper targets and of course our cars forming the camp.
I was reading a medical journal and looked up to see a white pickup driving past our camp in the direction of the end of the range. I got up and started yelling “Range is cold!” over and over. My buddy got up with a look of confusion. “What the heck?”
The truck drove to the end of the range, parked and 3 people and 2 dogs got out. People I can manage but dogs are fast and unpredictable especially in low brush which hides their movements. So we both switched from rifles to sidearms and grabbed some optics.
These people were just milling about while we were on high alert. A few minutes into this bizarre encounter a woman from the truck walked up to the 100 yard target to inspect it. “It’s like she is curious about something she’s never seen!” my buddy exclaimed. I was puzzled. This area of the desert is well known for weekend shooters so its not like we were doing something unique. But we were still in an information blackout due to the brush concealing their movements.
Then it dawned on me – send the drone downrange! Since I always keep it in the Jeep, I had it in the air in about 2 minutes. Now taking a page from Don Shift’s book on uses for a drone (my review is here) I not only wanted eyes on these weirdos but also to send a message: you are being surveilled.
After I flew over them at 200’ I descended and took a photo of the overall layout of people and vehicles. Our camp is in the distance under the blue canopy, 100 yard target dead center, people and one of the dogs – definitely a potential threat.
You can almost see their faces from 50’ altitude. These images, from a standard off-the-shelf $425 DJI drone are 4,000 pixels wide and I’ve cropped them for this post. Its pretty incredible imaging for the price and ease of use.
Oh hey, one of them heard it in the air and is pointing! Message sent. But I still think they are clueless and remain an unknown threat.
Finally, as they were loading up, my buddy suggested getting a photo of their license plate, just in case. Here is a shot on my descent to capture that.
Ultimately this strange encounter concluded with the white truck driving out along the same path in which it arrived but with that big dog running along side so we remained on alert and of course, I flew along side following them for 1/2 mile while mostly observing the dog. It all ended without any issues.
Lessons learned
Keep your drone batteries charged, I discovered 25% self-discharge per month on my rig. And they are not fast-charge batteries like power tools.
Learn to speak out concisely about what you see. Nobody else can see the video feed back to your smartphone so annotating and speaking about next actions (and results) helps the information flow in the team for analysis and decision making.
Read the instruction manual. I know, we’re all Alphas and don’t need to. Right. Except afterwards I learned that my drone has a 4x optical zoom with Swedish optics so I never needed to descend to snap the photo of the truck license plate.
Did I say learn to fly? Learn to fly. You need stick time unless you spin it up every day. You likely do this with comms and weapons; a drone is somewhat both.
If you didn’t already read Don’s book, go find a copy. I would never have thought of this real-time tack if he had not mentioned it as one use. Thanks, Don!