FPV racers, fiber-optic tethered drones and aircraft with Remote ID switched off broadcast nothing to detect. They can't stop making noise. Skywatch Acoustic listens for drone motors, and for gunshots and nearby pilot radios, and puts every detection on the same map as your Remote ID sensors.
An iPhone running Skywatch Acoustic Lab with a Shure MV88 microphone (and soon, microphones on Skywatch sensors) feeds a compact neural network that scores the sound every half second for drone motors. When you set up a new location, the app records its normal background first, so the alert threshold is set for that site rather than guessed.
Sound alone doesn’t give a drone’s position, so the marker sits at the microphone with a speaker icon and the drone was heard nearby. Each alert carries its start, end, detection score, motor tone and a short audio clip, and stays in history with your Remote ID flights.
The same microphones flag loud, sudden bangs. A single microphone can only say a shot was heard within about a kilometre, so the map draws a ring rather than a point. Fireworks, backfires and slams can trigger it, so every event is marked unverified until a person listens to the clip.
An FPV controller or goggles a few metres from the microphone clicks into its audio at a metronome-steady rate, often before the drone is even armed. Skywatch recognises that pattern and files it as a radio detection, an early sign that a pilot is standing near the sensor.
Confirm or reject each detection and say what it really was: radio clicks, fireworks, wind, a vehicle. Drag across the waveform to label exactly where a drone, shot or radio is heard; regions can overlap, so a drone flying through a net-gun shot trains both detectors.
Skywatch Acoustic Lab on iPhone with a Shure MV88 microphone, or the iPhone's own mic for quick tests.
Coming next: low-cost digital MEMS microphones on Skywatch rooftop sensors, reporting through the same pipeline.
Typically up to a couple of hundred metres for a small drone in calm air, much less in wind. Record your own site to find out.
Short clips around each alert, stored with the detection, playable and downloadable by authorised users only.
Members of a Skywatch team, or of an event while it’s on, see each other’s live position on the Skywatch map in the web app, the Skywatch iPhone app and the De-confliction app, right next to drones, acoustic detections and sensor coverage. No separate tracking app needed.
Create a standing team, or an event with a start and end time. Event members see each other only while the event is on.
Any member can invite people by email. Someone new creates their Skywatch account from the invite and joins straight away.
One location-sharing switch for your account, the same on every device. Teammates fade after 2 minutes without an update and disappear after 5.
Create a Skywatch account from any app and use it everywhere. Every account gets the De-confliction tool and the live map; law enforcement users can request full access from inside the app.
One account for the web app, the Skywatch iPhone app and the De-confliction app: the live map, alert zones, history, incident reports, teams and every module on this page.
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