Hi Jaime. I don’t do much drone work myself. But the only two I am aware of are:

1. Birdi
2. Drone Deploy

There’s also OpenDroneMap. I believe you can process the data online here, but under the condition that you share with the public.

GGIS can export files in many formats including shp files. In fact I can’t readily think of a GIS that doesn’t allow this facility. In case it helps others: GeoDA is good/excellent at examining data from a statistical point of view. It is not great at many other tasks that a “regular” GIS can do. I use it as an additional tool alongside another GIS. Although you are relatively inexperienced you might get along with QGIS as there are heaps of demos and you tube videos. As an aside I’m slightly amused by the number of people who are wanting to find something ‘simple’ for quite complex and specific processes (OK I know you said intuitive which is different). If I was going for one GIS system it would be QGIS (as it is fully featured), but I would expect to put in some effort into learning how to use it. In your specific use case you might find SAGA or GRASS has the tools you need, I don’t find these as intuitive as QGIS for general use, but for a specific purpose they might be easier to use overall. BTW QGIS can access the SAGA and GRASS tools as well.

Hopefully you’ve found an answer by now Denise. But for anyone else interested as far as I know there is no commercial GIS that is under $100 – a more realistic price would be at least 10x that figure. Also don’t assume mapping and GIS are entirely the same thing. A GIS may have decent or poor mapping capabilities, they come in many flavours, e.g. Manifold is a nice price and great at processing huge chunks of data but it’s mapping capabilities are lower than QGIS/ArcGIS. QGIS is my go to GIS but it has many advanced options which might be off putting for someone new to the subject (however there is a very active community around the software and decent youtube videos etc to help). When I was new to open source GIS I was fond of Mapwindow and the EPA BASINS version (excellent at hydrology mapping) and found them very easy to get started with.

Yes, in my experience (past decade or so). QGIS does crash occasionally but then so did ArcGIS, but less regularly. I have used a bunch of the Open Source GIS and have never had a virus etc introduced to the system.

Hi Joe I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re wanting the GIS to do or the output you want to see. Are you basically wanting to take your modelling output and finding out what county it is within, and adding that value to the modelling data? In case it helps – GIS polygons like your county area have several files defining the same collection of features (*.prg, *.shp , *.dbf etc) the is the projection of the file, dbf is the data. The only one you need to bring into the GIS is the *.shp file (this references all the other associated files for that data).

I mapped COVID cases by county daily throughout most of the pandemic, once the data started being published by the NY Times. Modeling the data of course is different. Did you find a way to do this? I used to do FORTRAN too, miss it!