Things in the air¶

A drone flight has a control link, a feed, a position and, in some operations, an operator’s identity. Around it are the radio signals, phones, access points and other devices on the same bands. The boxes built to find the drone hear parts of those bands.

The aircraft has paperwork¶

The control link carries commands for the flight, the video link carries the feed, and satellites give the position. Remote ID broadcasts the drone’s serial number and position, the pilot’s position or take-off point, and the operator’s registration number. Anyone with a phone app or an ESP32 receiver can read the broadcast.

An enforcement authority’s records can turn the registration number into a name. Somebody other than the pilot can hear, watch, forge or read each of them.

A wedding photographer, a roofer with a survey drone, a police unit over a football match, each puts some or all of these things into the air.

The ground has pockets¶

A person standing under the drone may have a phone. The phone uses some of the same bands that a detector sweeps and a 5G base station serves. The detector that filters phones out of its display received them first. The Commission calls sensing from the mobile network “cellular sensing”, the American word for it, and claims it will detect drones “connected or not”. Apparently copied and no clue. A phone is connected to a base station of that same mobile network.

The innocent noise¶

A detector begins with signals. A wideband receiver hears what is on its bands before software filters what belongs on the screen. A 5G sensing system can observe connected and unconnected objects. No document behind the grid mentions what it does with what it observed that was not a drone.

Asset	Whose	What can be done to it
The flight	pilot	Ended by a device that joins the control link
The feed	pilot, and whoever is filmed	Watched by a receiver on the video band
The position	pilot	Moved by false satellite signals
The operator’s registration number and position	pilot	Read by anyone in range; turned into a name by an enforcement authority
Permission to fly	operator	Withheld, under the proposed package, until the operator is identified
The phone’s emissions	bystander	Received and filtered; no document mentions whether they are kept
Whatever the grid records	both	How long it is kept, who may see it and when it goes are unspecified

What a state can then fasten to the person is the surveillance model’s list: a name, from the registry; an address, from a take-off point that repeats; a routine, from the flights and from a phone on the same base station at the same hours.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.