Drone Remote-ID Receiver

Reads the digital licence plate that compliant drones are required to broadcast.

Placeholder illustration. Real photographs go here once we have finished hardware to photograph — we will not use stock images of somebody else's equipment.

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A small ESP32 receiver that listens for the Remote ID broadcast the FAA requires most drones to transmit, and puts what it hears on a map running on your own laptop or Raspberry Pi. It will show you the drone's claimed position and, usefully, where the drone says its operator is standing.

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Pre-order means we build to order. Nothing is charged through this site — you talk to us first.

MIT and Apache-2.0 — source code ships with the unit.

CAPABILITY

What it does

Receives FAA Part 89 / ASTM F3411 Remote ID broadcasts over Bluetooth legacy advertising and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi beacon and NAN frames.
Decodes the broadcast contents: serial or session ID, the drone's claimed latitude, longitude and altitude, its velocity, a timestamp, and the control-station (operator) position.
Feeds a local web map over USB serial on your own computer or a dedicated Raspberry Pi base station. No cloud service, no account, no internet connection required.
Optionally relays detections over a Meshtastic LoRa mesh so several receivers can cover a property and report to one base station without any Wi-Fi or internet.
Ships with a built-in broadcast simulator so the whole chain can be bench-tested without a drone in the air.
Receives only. It does not transmit to, interrogate, or interact with the drone in any way.

LIMITATIONS

What it does NOT do

Read this part. It is the half of the specification most sellers leave out.

It detects compliant, Remote-ID-broadcasting drones only. Remote ID is a self-reported, unauthenticated broadcast with no cryptography behind it - a drone with it switched off, broken, spoofed, or never fitted is invisible to this receiver and to every other Remote-ID receiver on the market.
Realistic range with the stock antenna is low hundreds of feet. The one independent field measurement we trust - a reviewer who had a neighbour fly a real DJI drone over a wooded two-storey area - came in at roughly 500 to 800 feet, about 150 to 245 metres. Vendor material for boards in this family advertises 5 to 15 km. We do not repeat that figure, because we have not measured it and neither has anyone we can cite.
It cannot hear 5 GHz-only Remote ID, which some models (Skydio among them) use. The ESP32-S3 has no 5 GHz radio - this is a hardware limit, not a setting.
It parses legacy Bluetooth advertising only. Drones using Bluetooth 5 extended advertising can be missed. That came out of an independent code-level review, not a vendor datasheet.
Fibre-optic-tethered FPV drones broadcast nothing at all to receive, by design.
Network Remote ID - the cellular-uplink variant - is out of scope. This is the locally broadcast RF variant only, which is the point: nothing leaves your property.
The identity and position it displays are what the drone claims about itself. Nothing in the standard verifies either.
It does not jam, spoof, take over, or bring down anything. Receive only.

HARDWARE

Specifications

Receiver

Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 (Bluetooth 5 and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi), or a LILYGO T-Dongle-S3 variant with a built-in screen

Receives

ASTM F3411 / FAA Part 89 Remote ID over Bluetooth legacy advertising, Wi-Fi beacon information elements, and Wi-Fi NAN action frames

Decodes

Serial or session ID, drone latitude / longitude / altitude, velocity, control-station position, timestamp

Dashboard

Local web map over USB serial, on a laptop or a dedicated Raspberry Pi base station

Mesh option

Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V3 running Meshtastic, for multi-node coverage with no network of any kind

Measured range

About 500-800 ft (150-245 m) with the stock antenna in one independent field test. Antenna choice and mounting height are the biggest levers

Antenna upgrade

External 2.4 GHz antenna available. We test on your ground before quoting you any range figure

Bench testing

Built-in simulated-broadcast test harness - we verify every unit end to end before it ships

Network

No internet required. The only internet-touching feature upstream is an optional registration lookup, which is separable and left off

OPEN SOURCE

Licence & attribution

MIT and Apache-2.0

Detection firmware from the Colonel Panic drone-mesh-mapper / Sky-Spy lineage (MIT), built on the OpenDroneID opendroneid-core-c parsing library (Apache-2.0). Both are permissive licences; the required attribution and notice files ship with every unit. The ESP32 is re-flashable over USB and we do not lock it. Honest note on provenance: this is an actively developed single-maker open-source project, not an institutionally maintained one like the EFF's Rayhunter.

QUESTIONS WE GET

Straight Answers

Is it legal to receive these broadcasts?

Remote ID is a broadcast the FAA requires drones to transmit specifically so that the public and the authorities can receive it - 14 CFR 89.310 and 89.320 exist to maximise the range at which it can be picked up. Listening to an unencrypted broadcast that the law requires to be transmitted for public reception is not intercepting a private communication. That is our reading of the regulation, not legal advice.

So it cannot see a drone with Remote ID turned off?

Correct, and that is the honest limit of this entire detection method rather than a flaw in this particular build. Nothing in this category can force a drone to announce itself truthfully. If you need coverage against a deliberately silent aircraft, this is the wrong tool and we will tell you so.

How far does it actually reach?

Expect low hundreds of feet with the stock antenna. The only independently measured number we will stand behind is 500 to 800 feet. If you need more than that, we will fit an external antenna and test it on your property before we quote you any figure at all.

Can I see where the operator is standing?

You can see where the drone says the control station is - Remote ID includes that field, which is what makes this more useful than a generic "something is nearby" alert. It is claimed by the aircraft, not verified by anything.

Does any of this touch the internet?

No. The receiver talks over a USB cable to a dashboard on your own machine, or over a LoRa mesh to your own base station. That is the whole reason we picked this project over the cloud-dependent alternatives.

NEXT STEP

Talk to us before you buy a detector

Tell us what you are actually worried about. Half the time the honest answer is a different device, or none of them.

Request a Site Assessment Call (304) 555-0142