Controlling Drones with Satellites - EMF 2026

Thank you very much everyone. So drones, they are everywhere. Uh I guess easy way to start is uh hands up if you own a drone or know someone who does. I guarantee if this was 10 years earlier that would be a lot less hands. Uh but everyone is talking about them. They are everywhere. Uh the media in particular likes to talk about all sorts of interesting things like how drones are going to be flying boxes over our heads in 3 days time. Um I'm still waiting for that to happen. Uh but they are just everywhere and there have been a lot of changes over the years and a lot of speculation I guess and hype and what I kind of want to talk about is what is actually going on. What is where actually is the technology trying to ignore all of the uh you know spikes of one incident happening everyone talks about it and then everyone forgets about it. So, traditionally drones controlled by radio, although fiber optic is another growing method. Um, but effectively with radio you need direct line of sight. There are range limits. Uh, you can't have obstacles. So, no trees, no big buildings. Um, DJI planes 10 km. Uh, I have flown my DJI drone. It does not go more than 1 kilometer. So there is a record of 100 kilometers using ELS. Some insane person managed to fly it. Not sure how long it took, but uh 100 km on ELRS, but that used uh quite powerful transmissions that your average person probably shouldn't be uh blasting throughout England. Um, so one alternative that has been spoken about, but perhaps not as much as I'd like it to be spoken about, uh, is satellites, uh, using satellites to control drones. And you may think this is a solved problem. The US military has been doing this since 1994, albeit less for fun or science, more for blowing up children. But um they are able to control big drones from Las Vegas, going about 2,000 km from their home base. These are very nice. Um they do work. You can control drones with satellites. talk over. No, because um last time I checked, I didn't have 30 million pounds in my bank account. So, I guess I'm not buying that. Um but it it it that that's just for the drone as well, not for the uh custom military satellites or the missiles or anything else the drones come with. Um, and I guess there is quite a crude method that already exists technically, if you want to be technical, um, using GNSS. So, I'm sure many people are aware you can control drones with just standard GNSS way points. I mean, is RG pilot just putting some way points? Technically, GNSS comes from a satellite, therefore it's satellite controlled. So, uh, I guess problem solved. Uh, not really. You can't actually talk to it via GNSS. So, you just sort of have to set it off and hope it comes back. Uh, which I have personally seen it not come back before. So, that's not recommended. Uh, and also this is a map of current GNSS signal integrity across Europe as of Monday. There are a lot of places where GNSS will not work. So maybe if you are flying something over the lovely Y Valley, you might be okay. But if you want to fly it in any of the red areas, it might not come back. Um, so what are some alternative options? Effectively, some better ways to control drones from space. Um, probably the most obvious, most straightforward is Starlink standard broadband internet. Uh, uses, I believe at the moment, around 10,000 low Earth orbit satellites around 400 km up. Uh, standard broadband internet, I want to say it's like 700 megabit down, which good for games. 25 millisecond latency. Sounds pretty straightforward. The antennas are quite chunky and it is a bit expensive. Um, however, unfortunately, Starlink is not really a good option. Um, because I am not a Nazi. Um, so moving on to potentially a better option, we have Global Star. Probably more of a bit more of a standard IOT brand name. They have a LEO satellite network 24 bit less than 10,000 but uh you can still get as low as 25 millisecond latency. Um it's got existing IoT services which give you the nice small form factor. Uh good good price for satellite control to be fair. Um they have 28 ground stations in 18 countries. Uh the RM200M for example can communicate with Global Star. Uh and you know you can send and receive data there. Sounds fairly straightforward. Uh unfortunately global star is not really global star. Um the satellites cannot talk to each other with global star. They have to be in range of a base station which there are 28 of and they only can be so far away from them. So I guess nobody in Greenland is going to be using Global Star anytime soon. Um and similarly to Starink, they were purchased by Amazon earlier this year. So I guess we're not really uh doing well for avoiding capitalism. But um moving on to hopefully an option that isn't owned by an egotistical billionaire. Inmat Viaat. Uh some of you may know this company for their um tracking of various planes that have uh disappeared into who knows where. Uh but in very different to Global Star and Starlink. um InMosa operates a fleet of geo stationary satellites. So these instead of spinning around the earth, these stay in one place around the earth with the orbit about 35,000 km up which is quite high. Uh obviously because of that distance they're quite high latency. I don't know if anyone's tried FPV flying in particular, but waiting, you know, at fastest a second to uh move probably not ideal if you're flying towards a building. Uh it's also very expensive and very big. Um they are quite chunky marine waterproof units. They're very good for what they do, but putting one on a DJI drone is not going to go very far. I'm not sure the drone will fly. It's kind of essential. So, the next option, Idium. Idium operates a wide fleet of 66 low Earth orbit satellites. They have a very wide range of services. Uh they do IoT, telefan, asset tracking, all the right sort of form factor and price point for drones and the latency because they're low as orbit is also acceptable. The figures vary a lot, but potentially as low as 300 milliseconds. So again, maybe we're not flying FPV drones or doing anything too critical with them, but it does work. And most importantly, actually got global coverage. It's surprising that Global Star still doesn't. Um, but yes, Idium is fantastic. It is probably the best we've got at the moment given the price, the size, and everything. And again, you can actually go around the globe, which I thought would be a lot more common for satellites given they're quite high up. Um, but how does this actually work in practice? Thankfully, I don't need to do that because Skylift did that for me. Well, not for me, but so Skyift is a small enterprise based in Portsmouth in the south of England. Uh they build drones. Uh and effectively they proposed to the NHS that they were to deliver chemotherapy drugs with a short shelf life from uh QA hospital in Southport all the way to St. Mary's Hospital on the aisle of white. For those not familiar, it's very slow getting between them. Uh, and it's very expensive. It's far too expensive. Although it is nice going on a hovercraft. Um, but yeah, when you've got patients who are waiting, you know, have to have days of blood work and, you know, if if they don't don't pass the blood work, they can't take the drug. But the drugs last one day. There are a lot of medicines being wasted because they have to make them and ship them over in a van through Portsmouth which takes a very long time. So Skyft proposed flying them with drones and they had the first major trial of BV loss beyond visual line of sight uh flying of drones in partnership with the Civil Aviation Authority, Maritime and Coast Guard Agency and many many other organizations because it is very busy in the skies on the south of England. Um so they flew a number of drones from Fort Cumberland right on the bottom of Portsmouth to an unspecified part of the aisle of white. Um they used GNSS way pointing technically satellites I will argue that uh and they also used iridium short burst data as their communication system. So these drones were flying pretty much entirely off satellites. Now Aridium short burst data. What is it? So the sky lifts use this specific module in particular the rock block 9603. So short boss data is a specific protocol of Aridia designed for IoT and asset tracking widely used by a lot of companies. Uh but rather than sticking it on a container ship in the middle of the ocean, they put it on a drone and you can send and receive messages every 40 seconds uh up to 100 kilobytes. It's plug and play. There's an API. It's actually not the worst documentation I've ever seen, which is impressive. Um, and yeah, they use this to control it, uh, both for status updates and for emergency communications. So, should it not go where it should go, they can tell it, please do not crash into any planes or any boats because that would be expensive. So what did we learn from these trials? Uh the main thing is in order to actually run beyond visual line of sight, you need a lot of coordination. There are a number of companies operating beyond visual line of sight on a regular basis such as zipline in uh parts of Africa like Rwanda and Ghana. But relative to the UK, those countries are much much clearer in the skies. The UK is very congested. Pretty much everything across the Atlantic from Europe goes over England. There is far too much air traffic to just go, "Yeah, sure. Fly some drones, try not to crash them." We all saw what happened at Gatwick airport in 2018. Um, but this trial fed directly into uh BV loss policy within government. Uh although unfortunately the biggest lesson learned wasn't to do with satellites uh or drones really. It was more to do uh with the British weather. Um it was significantly postponed. They didn't get as much done as they wanted because it rained and it stormed. Uh storm ununice happened at the time which was not good. Um so maybe we can't be doing this all year round in the UK, but what can we do in the UK these days because of the weather? Could probably do it in this weather though. Um so yeah what are some of the general issues that were both addressed by this trial and generally with satellites on drones? Um one of the important ones is integration. They are talked about a lot but they are both still very much emerging technologies. Uh there are no real fully out there all-in-one solutions that me and you can just buy. Um, so a lot of the solutions, Skylift, Zipline, all the other companies are all making those bespoke with hundreds of hours of research from teams of engineers with government money. Uh, if we want to do it at home, it might end up looking a bit like a bomb. Uh, and I don't think being arrested is a great demonstration of the technology. Um, I'm sure some solutions will emerge over time, but we really are a bit of a step away from this becoming consumer available. Unfortunately, this next problem isn't really a problem for most of us. Bit more of a problem if you're flying somewhere Ukraine where there is jamming. Um, one of the highlights of Zapcom is that it's not the same frequency. They operate anywhere from in the 2.4 GHz band to 20 30 GHz. You can still jam them. The Russians have jammers everywhere that they are stopping anyone and everyone uh from doing stuff. So, but I guess again unless you're flying in Ukraine or somewhere else in Eastern Europe, this probably shouldn't be a problem for you. I'd hope. Uh, signal strength is quite a big problem. So, I took my own little satellite transceiver, the same one as used by Starlift, whacked it on my car, uh, in the middle of a field on top of a hill with no obstructions, nothing, and I let it run. Uh, and well, as you can see, I still don't receive very good signal. Um, with lowcost satellite solutions, you're having to cram quite a lot into quite a small package. And there's a long distance, a small low power antenna, it's going to struggle quite a lot of the time. So, if you're trying to fly this indoors, it's not going to work. Trying to fire this around some trees, it's probably not going to work. And especially since uh a certain someone has now planted 20 million more trees, there's 20 million more places. You cannot fly drones with satellites. So I guess the long and short of it is drones are cool. Satellites are cool. We are still a very very long way from Skynet actually taking over the world. I don't think it's going to be happening anytime soon. So, don't worry. Uh, but yeah, thank you everyone for listening. Um, if you have any questions, feel free to catch me around. But I hope this was interesting to some people.