A cold and frosty morning in Doncaster at Blyton Park Driving Centre – out with the drones and the BBC One Show team filming an article about potholes!
The One Show’s presenter Iwan Thomas presents the piece and overseas the competition judged by some eminent people in their field, Victoria Hazael (Cycling UK), Vince Crain (The AA), Keith Jones (Institution of Civil Engineers). The filming took place on Blyton Race Track in Lincolnshire, where three large potholes were repaired and reviewed. They will be testing out pothole repair technologies on the racing circuit itself and we will be providing supporting cinematography from an aerial perspective!
Watch the One Show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPqk2OEMYpU
Visual, Electrical or Thermal? What a Solar Panel Inspection Actually Comprises
Ask three companies for a solar panel inspection and you can receive three different pieces of work, all correctly described by that word. A visual inspection, string-level electrical testing and a thermographic survey answer three separate questions, and IEC 62446-1:2016 keeps inspection and testing in different clauses for exactly that reason. This article sets out what each technique comprises, what each one cannot reach, how the three relate, and how to word an enquiry so it returns the answer you actually needed.
Cell, Module, String, Array: How a Solar Installation Is Actually Wired
A solar installation is a four-level hierarchy: cell, sub-string, module and string within the array. A thermal camera records surface temperature across a flat plane, but the fault sits somewhere in that electrical structure, and interpretation is the work of deciding which level a warm area belongs to. This piece explains how photovoltaic installations are wired, why bypass diodes divide a module into blocks, and why the as-built string layout is as much a survey document as the imagery.
Why the Detail in an Aerial Survey Is Decided Before Take-Off
Most survey enquiries ask for high resolution without saying what the result has to do. Detail in a photogrammetric survey is not a setting applied in processing, it is a consequence of how high the aircraft flew and how much each photograph overlapped its neighbours. Both are fixed before take-off and neither can be improved afterwards. This piece explains what those two decisions control, what they cost in flying time, and why the useful thing to bring to a scoping conversation is an intention rather than a number.
