🗺️ Drone Coverage Calculator
Enter your flight time, ground speed, and swath width to estimate how many hectares a single battery can map or spray.
🌾 How Much Ground per Battery?
What is a Drone Coverage Calculator?
It estimates the area a single battery can cover on a mapping or agricultural mission from your flight time, ground speed, and the effective swath width of each pass. The result is a best-case figure in hectares.
Use it to work out how many batteries a field or survey site needs, to compare flight plans, and to quote jobs. Real coverage is lower once you account for turns, overlap, and re-flights, so plan spare packs and turnaround time.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How is coverage per battery estimated?
It converts your ground speed to metres per minute, multiplies by your flight time to get the distance flown, then multiplies by the swath width to get the area — reported in hectares. For example, 20 minutes at 36 km/h with a 50 m swath covers about 60 hectares in ideal conditions.
What is swath width?
Swath width is the effective width covered in a single pass — the width of the camera's ground footprint for mapping, or the spray boom's working width for agriculture. Wider swaths cover more ground per battery, which is why survey altitude and camera field of view have such a big effect on productivity.
Why is real coverage lower than this figure?
This is a best-case number that assumes you fly in one continuous line. Real missions lose ground to turns at the end of each pass, image sidelap and overlap for stitching, headland passes, and re-flights. Expect actual coverage to be meaningfully lower, so budget extra batteries.
How do I get more coverage per battery?
Fly higher for a wider swath (accepting a coarser GSD), fly faster within safe and blur-free limits, and use packs with more endurance. There's always a trade-off: higher and faster covers more ground but reduces resolution and image quality, so balance coverage against the survey's requirements.