Flying Signals: What to Do With Them

The talk surveys radio signals transmitted from things in the sky, grouped into four categories: animals, drones, aircraft and high-altitude balloons. It opens with the Motus wildlife tracking network, which fits tiny transmitters to birds, bats and insects and uses a grid of ground receivers that log each pass. The speaker shows how the resulting data can be explored online and how someone could build a receiver station. Throughout, the speaker stresses that cheap software-defined radio hardware works only with the correct antenna for each frequency.

The middle section covers drones and manned aircraft. For drones, the speaker explains the United States Remote ID requirement, which has drones broadcast their serial number, position, altitude, speed and operator location over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Phone apps and low-cost ESP32 boards can pick these up, and the talk discusses how operators sometimes try to hide their location. For aircraft, it covers ADS-B, UAT and TIS-B, including how receiver range depends on antenna height and how flight-tracking sites can omit flights on request. The final topic is weather balloon radiosondes, which are launched from many sites every day, and how hobbyists recover them and repurpose the hardware.

The main takeaway is that a lot of this traffic is unencrypted and easy to receive, which makes it useful for research and hobby projects. The speaker also raises questions about location privacy and about the rules for deploying receivers and tags. Hands-on demonstrations were planned for the RF Village after the session.