Probably a naive question, but would it be possible to use drones instead of helicopters for this?
My thinking is they are significantly cheaper to buy and fly, and presumably much safer for pedestrians too. Maybe they could also form a mesh network to avoid a single point of failure.
Depends how big the dish is. But at the size where it would become competitive for endurance and risk tolerance you might as well charter or buy an aircraft that'd do a better job.
If you want a drone that's safer than the average helicopter, you're going to be paying a lot of money.
Regarding safety, what I meant is that a helicopter coming down in a crowd is going to be absolute carnage - a drone could do serious damage, but the death and injury toll would surely be a rounding error by comparison.
The professional peloton is an incredibly noisy RF environment. Every rider is carrying a two-way radio and a telemetry transponder, every car in the caravan has multiple radio systems, the TV motos are transmitting back to relay trucks with satellite uplinks. Much of a grand tour takes place on mountain roads replete with canyons, cuttings and tunnels.
If you're flying a drone in proximity to the peloton, it's not a question of if you'll lose your control signal link, but how often. I don't know how anyone could operate a drone in that environment with any degree of confidence, even if it's capable of GPS position hold. What happens if you lose your control link just as your battery is running flat? What happens if your chase vehicle gets stuck in traffic and your drone is stuck loitering on the other side of a tunnel? How can a large, heavy drone autonomously find a safe landing place on a mountain stage that's littered with thousands of spectators? A drone big enough to carry the requisite broadcast equipment is undoubtedly heavy enough to kill a bystander.
Broadcasters and race organisers have been using helicopters for decades and know how to manage them safely. Drones simply present too many unknowns. To the best of my knowledge, no helicopter has ever crashed while covering a cycling race. There have been a few incidents where the downdraft from a helicopter caused riders to crash, but none of them were serious.
Semi-pro drones aren't reliable enough. DJI recently shipped batteries for the Matrice and Inspire 2 which failed mid-flight due to a firmware bug. Affected drones fell out of the sky. Most "pro" drones haven't had anywhere near the level of auditing that any commercial helicopter has gone through.
The lightest video-capable satellite terminal that I, a mere civilian, know of weighs around 3kg. Even as a satellite equipment, it's relatively expensive to buy and operate. Its power requirements are also non-trivial, both because of the need for highly compressed video and the high-power radio transmission.
My thinking is they are significantly cheaper to buy and fly, and presumably much safer for pedestrians too. Maybe they could also form a mesh network to avoid a single point of failure.