Drone,
I hear ya! Just be careful that you don't bite off too much, too soon. As Steve noted, MP is the Grand Daddy but it'll take some learning. Tower will take a bit of learning too but it's a little less complex. It'd be a lot easier to help if we (I) knew what you were trying to achieve. Tower is somewhat simplistic but it's a bit more robust than many think. If you're trying to do advanced maneuvers, it may be a bit lacking but if you're trying to get images of certain items or features it should be able to fill the bill. It's too hard to say based on what I've been able to understand is your objective. You should be able to "test" some of these strategies before going out into the field for the real deal. Just my opinions.
Jerry
I'm part of my local Las Vegas Soaring Club, still a new member, and I volunteered along with four other senior members of the club who was asked by our neighbor across the street, a gun club, to use our capabilities to locate GPS coordinates that mark their property line, and have a crew install warning posts to hikers using unofficial trails to get into the shooting range. Our club actually is within their property line too so it's only natural / logical they ask us to do it.
I'm actually the volunteer designated to simply get 4K orbit footage of the range while one of the senior members who has a ground station capability of flying his Phantom to a GPS coord is officially designated to do the plotting/surveying. A small crew from the gun range tethered to our ground control members via walkie-talkies will be following the Phantom in ATVs to the spots where it will loiter and then move onto the next spot until all the coordinates given are marked. As far as I know from our prep exercise at our airfield on Saturday, they're using a separate ground station mounted on a tripod that's connected with the Phantom as an additional FPV, calling out the GPS coordinate which he then flies to. One of the senior members is already working out the SP to GPS coords and didn't want to bother him with noob questions that's out of scope for my volunteer role. Was thinking, "afterward", I'll pick his brain. One other senior member will be taking his winged aircraft to do video footage of the surrounding mountain ridge. Really eager to get footage of his bird taking off.
While we were at it on the official project day, I wanted to be able to take advantage of the Solo's capabilities to do a post-implementation flight to all the posted markers and have 4K video results the gun club owners can use for "verification" and "auditing" purposes of the effort and also for my club to use for use-case learning, marketing or whatever.
I want to take advantage of this opportunity to learn what the Phantom will be doing, using the "Solo way", i.e. plotting out the locations using Tower / Mission Planner, with the learning curve also taking me down the route of having to learn State Plane measurement, Plat maps, County Assessor map which isn't really a map but more like the lines that would be on a map, Google Earth etc, etc. Ugh. I thought that part was going to be a slam dunk but, it's not. One good grief moment I had was trying to superimpose the Assessor's bare bone map onto the Google Earth map and I was like, dammit, why isn't this part the easiest?? Lol.
So, yeah, the above is the 360 foot overview of what I, we're trying to accomplish. I'm just making it more hard on myself trying to learn it all at once for and from the perspective of a Solo user. On the selfish side, I'm trying to build up my UAS related resume.
I can confirm with no hesitation whatsoever that this site, and you guys, are the absolutely the best for someone crazy like me trying to learn all this stuff at the same time. I'm appreciative at all the information and assistance I've gotten thus far. It's a much needed "overlay" on top of all the learning curve ugh-ness to which at some point in my future, I can say to another, my resume wouldn't be where it's at if it wasn't for "these guys", i.e. this site and you all.