Is Now A Great Time to Upgrade Your Prospecting Drone

Recycle Precious MetalsRecycling and Refining
Written By Barry Lenson

Falling Prices and Better Technology Make this a Great Time to Upgrade Your Prospecting Drone

We have written about drones before on this blog. They could be the greatest devices ever invented to look for precious metals.

Armed with a camera-equipped flying drone, you can:

  • Go hunting across large areas of land for old buildings, wells, gravesites, abandoned vehicles  and raised mounds of earth that you can then visit and inspect

  • Look on top of old buildings and around them to see if anything is being stored there

  • Conduct end-of-day visual inspections of beaches, parks, and lakefront areas to look for lost or forgotten items

Four Reasons this Is a Good Time to Upgrade Your Drone

  1. Longer flying times let modern drones stay aloft for 45 minutes or more

  2. Improved cameras produce better images of the areas you have checked out

  3. Improved range let you fly your drone farther away from the “home base” where you are standing

  4. Falling prices mean you can get a powerful, full-featured drone with a long-range and an excellent camera for about $400 – about half what a similarly equipped drone cost four or five years ago

Some Models for Precious Metal Prospectors to Consider

There are many good models to consider – just check them out online. But here are some that are good choices for precious metal prospectors:

  • All the drones that EXO makes. Check out this company’s selection of drones that sell for about $300. All feature long ranges, extended flying times, and excellent cameras. And we really like the way they fold up into a compact size that makes them easy to pack and carry to remote areas for exploration.

  • DJI Air drones. Whether you want to spend $400 or $1,000, this company has something for you. The more you spend, the longer the range and flying time you get. But even the less expensive models from this company are feature-packed enough to let precious metal prospectors expand their search area significantly.

Other brands to investigate are Ruko and Holy Stone.

And remember to purchase and carry some extra batteries. There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting around for batteries to charge when you’d rather be flying.

Underwater Drones Are Hot Choices Too

Recently, a new kind of drone has begun to sell in bigger numbers. They are underwater drones and if you are interested in prospecting underwater near the shore or adjacent to a boat, you might want to add one of these devices to your prospecting arsenal.

They function much like a flying drone and are able to transmit photographs back to a phone or home base. Plus, they are tethered, which means that they have long cables attached to them that let you pull them back in if they become tangled in underwater vegetation. If you are willing to spend upwards of $4,000, you can even get a model that has a claw that lets you retrieve small items that are sitting on lake bottoms and other underwater locations.

One model to check out is the Gladius Mini Underwater Drone, which sells for about $1,100. But with some searching online, you can find many more models to choose from. Carefully read the product descriptions of underwater drones before ordering, because some of them are more intended to help anglers find underwater schools of fish than to search for lost items and treasure.

And When You Find Treasure . . .

Give our precious metal recycling consultants a call at 800-426-2344 and let’s discuss what you have. We are here to test your gold scrap, silver scrap, and platinum scrap discoveries and recycle them for you.

Barry Lenson
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