Paths through the air¶
A drone’s four links are the only ways in and out of it, and each is a path a stranger can take. Some paths end at the drone and some at the pilot, and the longest ends in an archive nobody has yet described. The Commission’s plan would put all of them into one picture.
Each path starts with a radio or a microphone and ends with a drone losing one of its links, or with a record of what the radio or the microphone picked up.
control link video link satellite position Remote ID
│ │ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
D-JACK joins the Vydun shows the spoofer moves ESP32 receiver
protocol, drone feed on its own the position, reads serial,
accepts no commands screen drone turns back position, operator
number
│ │ │ │
└──────────────────────┴──────┬──────────┴──────────────────┘
▼
5G cells sensing the drone itself, "connected or not"
│
▼
airspace picture integrating all relevant data
│
▼
incident platform or coordination mechanism
Listening on the drone’s bands¶
The Vydun 7.5 sweeps four bands from 910 MHz to 7.5 GHz, and the 8.5’s top band reaches 8.8 GHz. Those bands include the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz that drones use for control and video, and the 900 MHz and 1.2 GHz bands beside them. The detector has two modes: a fast sweep that compares what it hears with a database of known drone signals, and a slow step through the spectrum in increments the operator sets. When the sweep finds a drone, its video appears on the screen. Babai’s director told Defense Express the operator “can instantly switch between channels”.
The same sweep passes over every phone, access point and headset in range; the device drops them from its display. Whether it stores them before dropping them is not in the article.
Listening on everyone’s bands¶
Virkkunen describes 5G antennae as a distributed radar capacity, and the press release claims the mobile networks will detect drones “connected or not”. A drone without a SIM is one of the unconnected things the sensing looks for; a phone is one of the connected things it sees on the way.
Listening with microphones¶
Each node of the Rzeszow mesh has a microphone and decides on its own whether what it hears comes from a drone; when it does, the node sends an alert. The nodes transmit nothing to find a drone, and three of them together fix where it is. Radar transmits; this does not. The sensors are microphones on poles.
Joining the link¶
Contra-drone claims the D-JACK inserts itself into an analogue FPV control protocol and the drone accepts no further commands. The company states it is built for analogue links and not for the digital ones a Mavic or a Zala uses. The Jammer Hackathon asked its teams for cyberattacks on the control protocols of those digital drones. SkyJack took over Parrot and 3DR drones in 2013, and MAVSploit tests MAVLink autopilots.
Reading the beacon¶
Remote ID is a broadcast over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth: the drone’s serial number and position, the pilot’s position or take-off point, and the operator’s registration number. An ESP32 receiver reads it; a spoofer writes false ones.
The archive¶
Three documents, three homes for what the antennas hear. Virkkunen’s speech names an EU Drone Incident Platform. The press release names an airspace picture in which all relevant data are integrated. The plan names a coordination mechanism between the Commission and Member States.
Between them they have named everything that goes in. None of the three mentions how long any of it stays, or who may come back later and ask.
Every arrow the plan draws runs towards the picture. Not one runs from the picture to the bin. That arrow has always been the hardest for an institution to draw, and the easiest to leave for a later document.
The drone refuses itself¶
The release’s airspace picture is there to identify legitimate drones, and the package makes an identified operator the condition of flight. Remote ID hands the registration number to anyone in range; an enforcement authority’ s records hand over the person behind it. The proposed package makes the drone itself refuse, with “technical safeguards, ensuring that drones cannot leave the ground unless the operator is identified”, and standardised zones will, in Tzitzikostas’s words, “prepare the ground for future geofencing”.
No sensor has to have received anything. Nobody has to have found the flight dangerous. The drone is the compliance desk, and it is to refuse the flight itself.
So¶
what the documents draw what no document mentions
Remote ID broadcast an antenna
│ │
▼ ▼
registration number, read by anyone in range everything on the band, drone or not
│ │
▼ ▼
an enforcement authority turns it into a name airspace picture, incident platform
│ │
▼ ▼
the picture sorts the drone as legitimate a record
│ │
▼ ▼
the package withholds take-off, kept how long, queried by whom,
a geofence withholds the zone deleted when: in none of the three
Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.