Some amazing engineer built a drone that can lift its own weight using only the electric power that it gets from an on-board solar panel and nothing else (no battery).

Video: I Built a Solar Powered Drone and it WORKS by Luke Maximo Bell

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[–] SARGE@startrek.website 7 points 1 day ago

I am someone who is interested in rc planes, multirotors, and automation in general. Not an expert by any measure, but have some experience.

A hybrid quad-rotor/plane would be much better for this. They can VTOL, hover, do all the quadcopter stuff, but there's still the usual plane motors to push the whole thing forward. The wings provide tons of lift and reduce the overall power usage of the system. Have it circle above an area until you don't need the pop-up mesh network.

I've seen a few content creators like rctestflight make full solar planes, running ardupilot to fly way point missions and circle around for as long as possible.

Combining the two might reduce the overall efficiency when compared to either separately, I imagine the extra grams from the mesh radios would still allow for very long flight times.

So theoretically you should be able to toss a couple out that can circle overhead and act as super long line-of-sight relays and provide coverage over a huge area, all of which couod be deployed and packed up in minutes.