Adam has spent his career exploring the natural and human world from above using drones, satellites, and mapping tools. His company Crossbill Geospatial provides data and consultation on all things geospatial. Connect with him on Linkedin and at his website.
I have flown many of the enterprise drones on the market to create maps and data for remote sensing analysis. When Inspired Flight reached out and offered me a demo unit of their medium lift IF800 Tomcat to review on behalf of The Drone Girl I cleared my schedule. I wanted to determine if this system meets the requirements of a high-output geospatial firm.
Inspired Flight Technologies is an American drone company headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California. For U.S.-based drone pilots, that makes Inspired Flight all the more compelling given the recent FCC ban on future, foreign-made drones. Additionally, the IF800 meets NDAA and Blue UAS requirements, which is another key selling point.
The Inspired Flight IF800 Tomcat drone starts at about $30,000, not including the payload.
- Order the Inspired Flight IF800 Tomcat drone now from B&H Photo.
- Order the Inspired Flight IF800 Tomcat drone now from Drone Nerds.
Getting started flying the IF800 Tomcat
In preparation to fly this platform, I took a 90-minute training from IF staff who made sure I had everything I needed to be successful and were very helpful in answering all my questions. I also found the provided checklist were comprehensive and made sure I didn’t have to troubleshoot anything in order to get off the ground.
The IF800 Tomcat is, by all accounts, a big platform. It arrives in a substantial case where the platform sits upside down, requiring the attachment of landing gear before flight. For those used to the folding arms of a DJI M300, the IF800 should feel familiar. It features four robust rotors, integrated strobe lights for visibility, and an FPV camera for pilot orientation.
The amount of space needed for all this equipment will come as no surprise to field-going professionals, but is worth mentioning as cargo space may need to be planned for. Shown here are the Sentera 65R, RTK module, platform/GCS case, landing pad, and battery case.
The Ground Control Station
The Ground Control Station (GCS) is equally substantial. It is a large, rugged unit running a customized wrapper of QGroundControl (QGC) mission planning software. While the size and weight might be a shock at first, the large screen size is welcome given the detailed user interface during flights.
The controller allows you to use either the internal battery or a replaceable external battery on the back, giving you the option for seamless hot-swapping. This is key for enterprise users in ensuring the GCS never dies during a long day of back-to-back missions.
The platform reports on two separate GPS units, which likely accounts for the impressive geo-referencing accuracy observed even when flying without active RTK corrections. In my tests, I usually had at least 30 satellites for each GPS when flying.
Related read: American drone maker launches NDAA compliant drone with 40-minute flight time
Batteries and flight time
The aircraft batteries are large, heavy units that must be powered on before they are clipped into the platform. They are hot swappable, meaning the aircraft can stay on during battery swaps. I found I consistently got at least 30 minutes of flight time (while landing at 30%) while flying in the 4,500ft elevation foothills of Utah during winter. Flying at different elevations, temperatures, and with other payloads will affect flight times.
My payload: the Sentera 65R
The IF800 Tomcat pairs with a variety of payloads, including EO/IR, optical, and LiDAR sensors. I chose to fly it with the Sentera 65R because of the high resolution data it can produce and to test the claims of it being an ideal mapping camera.
I was able to interview Matt Skelton who is a Product Marketing Manager at John Deere, which owns Sentera, about the 65R. He explained that the camera is tuned specifically for vegetation and scientific accuracy and favors a scientific output. By minimizing the internal image processing such as digital sharpening and color-grading, Sentera ensures the data is a more authentic representation of the ground which is crucial for repeatable academic or industrial research.
The 65R is a 65 megapixel RGB (RGB stands for Red-Green-Blue, meaning it only captures within the visible spectrum) camera with an integrated 500gb solid state hard drive that allows for a shocking 3 image captures per second.
It is mounted to the platform by utilizing Freefly’s smart dovetail design which allows for efficient and straightforward payload swaps.
I wouldn’t consider the Sentera 65R a jack-of-all-trades camera. It accomplishes surveying, mapping, and analytics functions extremely well, but if you are looking to perform infrastructure inspections or shoot cinematic 4K video, I would look at other options. This sensor was purpose-built for photogrammetry and vegetation analysis.
The 65R’s hidden jewel is the global shutter. In the world of high-resolution aerial mapping, the alternative rolling shutters can introduce image distortions that ruin sub-centimeter accuracy and can confound photogrammetry software. The 65R global shutter has no such issues, allowing for faster flight speeds without sacrificing clarity.
Drawbacks worth considering
My primary pain point? You can’t adjust the focus, shutter speed, ISO, or aperture of the images being taken. While I personally prefer to have control over these settings, in the end I had to trust the sensor to do its job.
Skelton later told me that you can control camera settings before flights via a connected web interface with the camera. With that, I concluded that I could tolerate the camera managing the image capture settings independently, as it performed remarkably well. However, for users looking for more control, Skelton said that an in-app adjustment feature is planned for the 2026 roadmap.
And for what it’s worth, the results were hard to argue with. I tested the 65R in high-contrast sunlight and flat, cloudy conditions. In every instance, the auto-exposure was spot on and the camera switched parameters and adapted even as lighting conditions changed throughout survey flights. All my images were sharp and well focused with no input from me.
A cropped image from a 65R image taken at 80m AGL. Some horses chewing on grass whose blades you can pretty much count.
The 65R workflow
Perhaps the most significant departure from a normal workflow is the 65R’s use of internal Solid State Drive (SSD) storage rather than removable SD cards. The camera captures data so rapidly (up to 3 every second) that an SD card simply cannot keep up with the write speeds required for a 65MP sensor.
From a certain perspective this creates a slight dilemma in the field which requires one of two approaches:
- The “Fly All Day” Approach: The camera has a half-terabyte of storage. You can fly all day (or all week) without worrying about space, monitoring the storage level via an icon in the GCS.
- The “QC as You Go” Approach: For those of us who have had to refly projects because we have been burned by a corrupted card or a blurry lens in the past, we like to check data between flights (like a painful experience with a hot stove, you only need to learn that lesson once).
Because the media isn’t removable, checking the data means plugging the entire drone (or the camera via an AC adapter) into a laptop.
While transfer speeds are impressive ( roughly 130 MB/s on Windows and potentially faster on Mac), it is still a process that requires the drone to be grounded. To optimize efficiency, I suggest adopting an F1-style pit stop strategy.
By designating a specific crew member to be ready with a laptop and hard drive the moment the drone touches down, you can facilitate real-time data backups during battery swaps and flight plan uploads. This coordinated approach allows a pilot and observer to maintain nearly continuous flight operations throughout the day. For field backups, utilizing high-quality USB-C cables is ideal; my testing showed that 8GB of data could be transferred in under two minutes.
Backing up data isn’t as simple as copying data off of an SD card.
While the equipment is certainly impressive, I like to remind people that the data being collected is the whole purpose of these tools. I processed the 65R data using Agisoft Metashape, and the results were clean and sharp.
Often, drone lenses produce a “fish-bowl” distortion at the edges of a 3D model, yet in my tests the resulting elevation model and orthomosaics had no bowing. I would attribute that to the global shutter, low lens distortion and high GPS alignment between photos. The point clouds and Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) were incredibly sharp as well.
Here are the expected ground sample distances you can expect from different flying heights according to the Sentera online calculator:
| AGL | Ground Sample Distance |
| 100ft/30m | 0.14in/0.35cm |
| 200ft/60m | 0.28in/0.7cm |
| 300ft/90m | 0.42in/01.05cm |
| 400ft/120m | 0.56in/1.4cm |
I was able to replicate these resolutions in my test flights. As you can see from the table, the lowest resolution flying under Part 107 you’re going to get from the 65R is a pixel representing a 1.4cm square on the ground. That’s just about the size of one of the keys on the keyboard in front of you. Not bad!
An example of the high resolution imagery from the 65R, with a Pilot-in-Command, and his two kids ‘working’ as Visual Observers in a parking lot
Even without the RTK/PPK module fully engaged, the data lined up with real-world coordinates with surprising accuracy, likely due to the high-quality GPS redundancy on the IF800.
IF800: Who is this drone for?
For mapping professionals who need to cover large acreage with high-resolution, scientifically accurate data, and who need to do it within a secure, NDAA-compliant framework, this is one of the top platforms and camera combinations on the market. The upcoming 2026 updates, which Matt Skelton promised will include 12-bit RAW capture and integrated camera controls within the GCS, will only make this system more formidable.
- Order the Inspired Flight IF800 Tomcat drone now from B&H Photo.
- Order the Inspired Flight IF800 Tomcat drone now from Drone Nerds.
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