aka Electronic Drone Surveillance Broadcast
A free and open network for broadcasting live drone locations. One shared airspace picture for every drone in the sky. Open to everyone, anywhere in the world. Secure by design, and reliable when it matters most.
The goal of EDS-B is to make it as easy as possible to share your drone's live location with the pilots around you, with other airspace users and, when you choose, with the public. Share it, and you fly with the full picture. The drones around you are on your map, you are on theirs, and nobody surprises anybody.
The result is real-time airspace deconfliction, drone to drone and drone to manned aircraft. It also gives you the choice to let people on the ground see where your drone is while you work overhead.
Installing a third-party app on your drone controller is something you should rightfully be careful about. So here is what it does, and what it does not.
Install the free Eagle Eyes app on your drone controller and fly in DJI Pilot 2 or DJI Fly exactly as always. Your piloting app keeps full control of the drone.
In Companion Mode the app does not connect to the aircraft. DJI's own app makes the drone's live location available on the controller, and Eagle Eyes simply reads it there.
Position and altitude go out on the EDS-B network, to whoever you have chosen. There is no impact on the control or the safety of your flight.
The Eagle Eyes app is what broadcasts your drone to the EDS-B network, and it is free. Share your drone's live location with whoever you want, and see other drones live as you fly.
Works with DJI drones today. Autel is coming soon, and Parrot and Skydio support is in development.
Planes and helicopters broadcast their live position over a radio system called ADS-B, and anyone with a receiver can hear them. It is why you can open a flight tracking site and watch air traffic move across the sky. Drones are not allowed to use it. Remote ID, the broadcast drones do have, only carries about as far as a WiFi signal. What is in the air announces itself, and almost nobody hears it.
EDS-B carries drone positions over the networks we already rely on. Cellular, WiFi, Starlink, or just a portable router on scene when there is no coverage at all. Your drone's location reaches as far as the network does, not as far as its own radio does.
Every drone broadcasting on EDS-B appears on every other pilot's map, live, beside their own aircraft. Drones that hear manned aircraft over ADS-B put them on the same map, and a Remote ID receiver adds the drones that are not broadcasting. Manned aircraft pilots operating near drones can open the same picture and see every drone in their area, live, so everyone shares the airspace safely and in the open. Nothing is shared until you switch it on, and you choose who sees it.
You choose who sees it
The pilot chooses how they share their own live location, and any ADS-B or RID-detected aircraft they pick up.
Every drone broadcasting publicly on EDS-B, live, in your browser.
You control who sees your drone. Local Wi-Fi broadcasts never leave your network. CalTopo channels are private to the people on your shared map. And EDS-B never shows the pilot's location, only the drone's.
Free for everyone, anywhere in the world.
Connect the Eagle Eyes app to your team's CalTopo map and enable live tracking. Your drone's position is sent encrypted over the internet, about once per second, to a private channel tied to that map. Everyone working from the map sees your drone live, including a command post far from the field.
Joining the map is what joins you to the channel: there are no extra codes to distribute. Requires internet on the broadcasting device and an Eagle Eyes license for CalTopo tracking.
On the local channel, devices broadcast directly to each other over the WiFi network they share, about ten times per second. There is nothing to configure and no internet connection needed: a portable router or a phone hotspot in the field is enough.
This is the recommended baseline for any multi-drone operation. It keeps working when cell coverage does not.
The public channel is a global, open feed of drones that have chosen to broadcast publicly, much like ADS-B in manned aviation. Anyone tuned in to EDS-B worldwide, or the public live map on this site, can see them.
Privacy protections are built in: your drone's identity is redacted, your home location is removed, and contact details are only shared if you explicitly turn that on. Share publicly when operating in shared airspace where other agencies may also have drones up.
A Remote ID receiver plugs into a device running the Eagle Eyes app or Mirada and picks up the Remote ID broadcasts of nearby drones. Those detections are relayed onto the EDS-B network, so one receiver on the incident makes every RID-broadcasting drone in the area visible to all pilots and all Mirada case viewers.
A receiver can run in standalone relay mode with no drone connected. Detections can also come in through the DroneTag API, feeding drones detected by DroneTag's receiver network into the same shared picture.
Your own drone is not one of the detections. Fly with a receiver connected and your own aircraft is broadcasting Remote ID too, so your receiver hears it. Detections are deduplicated. Your drone is never drawn a second time on your map, and that detection is never rebroadcast on any share channel you have set.
Remote ID is a compliance broadcast, not a deconfliction tool. A compliant drone announces where it is and who is flying it, but it does so over WiFi and Bluetooth, the same short-range radios that are in your phone. The signal often does not reach past a tree line, and it carries nowhere near far enough to warn a helicopter coming through at speed.
Between drones on the same operation it is not much better. These are weak signals, and terrain, obstacles and every other radio in the area work against them. Remote ID tells you what is in the air right next to you. It cannot tell you what is in the air you are about to fly into.
EDS-B carries positions over cellular, WiFi and Starlink instead, so range stops being the limit. Remote ID still matters on the edges. A receiver picks up the drones that are not on EDS-B and puts them on the same shared picture.
ADS-B stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. Break the name down and it explains itself. Automatic: the aircraft sends its position on its own, about once a second, nobody has to ask. Dependent: it depends on the aircraft's own GPS to know where it is. Surveillance: its whole job is letting others track the aircraft. Broadcast: it shouts to everyone, and any receiver in range hears it.
Drones are prohibited from broadcasting ADS-B, for two reasons that both matter. The first is spectrum. ADS-B runs on frequencies shared with air traffic radar and collision avoidance, and there are already far more registered drones than registered aircraft. Put transmitters on all of them and you degrade the system manned aviation relies on to keep itself safe. The second is that ADS-B is built for a different layer of the sky. Manned aircraft mostly operate well above 500 feet, while drones work under 400, in denser traffic with tighter margins, above the streets and the people on the ground. The aircraft that do come down to that level, the SAR helicopter, the air tanker, the police aircraft, are exactly the ones drones are most likely to conflict with.
Regulators gave drones Remote ID, which works but is local and one-way. It reaches whoever is close enough to hear it, and needs a receiver nearby to catch it. EDS-B is the layer that catches those signals and shares them, doing for drones what ADS-B did for manned aviation.