Frequently asked questions
Technical and security-sensitive answers stay high level here. Qualified applicants receive the detail through an approved contact process.
What signals does UAVSignal currently support?
Analog FPV video channels and compatible DJI DroneID signals. Nothing else is claimed in the current build.
Does it detect every drone or aircraft?
No. It detects the supported signal types above. It is not an airspace awareness system and does not see aircraft.
What does the analog video scanner show?
Activity across supported analog video channels, and a direct path to open the received video in the product.
Is the OSD in analog video turned into data?
Not in the current build. The overlay is burned into the picture the aircraft sends, and the decoder recovers that picture, not text fields — no OSD text is read, parsed or validated today, and nothing from it becomes a separate data source. Turning that overlay into structured metadata with a model trained for it is a roadmap direction, with no committed delivery date.
What DJI DroneID data is available?
Only what a packet with an intact checksum carries, and only the fields that packet includes: model, serial and UUID; aircraft position, altitude and height; velocity and heading; operator and home position; and flight state. Values the packet does not carry stay empty rather than being shown as zero.
Can the system work without public internet?
Yes. Scanning, decoding, video review and the stored detection timeline all run on the machine that receives the signal, and the DJI DroneID geo view is drawn locally with no external map tiles. Reaching a remote sensor can use a local network rather than the public internet.
How does remote laptop access work at a high level?
The machine that receives the signal keeps receiving and decoding; a laptop reaches it over the network and works with the scanner, the video player and the DJI DroneID view. It is off by default, is started only for an agreed test, and the network details are agreed privately.
Are Radxa/tablet and cloud analysis available now?
No. The current test build is a desktop application that runs on the operator's own machine. A Radxa with a local tablet, and cloud upload for analysis across sessions, are roadmap directions only — they are not part of the current build, and no delivery dates are committed.
What equipment and operating system are required?
A supported SDR receiver — HackRF One, or ADALM-PLUTO (PlutoSDR) — and a desktop computer. HackRF One connects over USB and needs no libhackrf or hackrf-tools install. PlutoSDR connects over USB or Ethernet and needs libiio 0.25/0.26 present on the host (1.x is not compatible). The build is verified on macOS on Apple Silicon; other desktop platforms are not yet verified.
What happens after I apply for testing?
A person reviews it. If the current build fits your scenario, a team member contacts you using the details you left, to arrange a test. Submitting an application does not grant automatic product access.
What information should not be included in the application?
No classified information, exact locations, operational frequencies, call signs or network credentials. Model names are enough for hardware, and the free-text field should stay free of operational detail.
What does the product store on disk?
Only what you turn on. Scanner detection history is off by default; once enabled, event details and thumbnails are written to a local folder and pruned after a retention period you choose. The DJI DroneID view is memory-only — observations are never written to disk and are cleared when the application closes.
Can it transmit, jam or interfere with an aircraft?
No. It receives and processes radio signals. There is no transmit path in the product, and it does not jam, control or otherwise affect an aircraft.
How can UAVSignal be deployed?
A sensor is one receiver plus the computer it is connected to, and there are three ways to run one, all available for evaluation. Mobile: carry the sensor and scan the area around you as you move. Stationary: a fixed notebook or desktop as the working environment, with every view, recording and the stored detection history in one place. Remote: receiving and decoding run headless on a small single-board computer at the antenna — we profile on Radxa, and Raspberry Pi is not verified yet — which you reach from a tablet, phone or desktop browser over a local network or the internet, with remote access off by default, token-protected, and enabled only for an agreed test. Beyond a single sensor, combining several of them so their observations can be analysed together and a position estimated by triangulation — on a server inside your own infrastructure, or as a hosted service — is a roadmap direction with no committed delivery date.