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Packet Radio
Every other way of watching needs a network. A wfb-ng packet radio needs nothing but the two halves of itself, so video and telemetry keep moving where there is no cellular coverage at all, and through jamming. It runs alongside the cloud and tailnet routes rather than replacing them.
The link has two halves
The drone half ships in the Aircast image. The ground half is a laptop or single-board computer you set up once. Both need a supported adapter: RTL8812AU cards, such as the ALFA AWUS036ACH.
On the device, video reaches the transmitter as RTP over UDP; the radio carries it to the ground station, where it arrives for QGroundControl alongside MAVLink telemetry.
The port that looks like broken hardware
| Port | Side | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 5602 | drone | Where the transmitter listens. Aircast sends here. |
| 5600 | ground | Where the receiver sends. QGroundControl reads here. |
It needs the engine backend
In the app the drone serves, open Settings → Device → Cameras, open a camera's Sharing & recording, and look at Video without cellular. If it reads unavailable, it names the reason: this device carries video through mediamtx, which has no radio output, so a setting saved there would never reach an antenna. Open Engineering → What carries video and press Switch to the engine. The device restarts, video drops for a few seconds, and the radio form unlocks.
Once a camera is pointed at the radio, the row reports what the radio is actually doing rather than what you configured: on air with a signal figure, or not transmitting. The radio carries one camera at a time. Channel, region and transmit power live on the Video engine page under Packet radio, and a number that isn't a WLAN channel (1-14 on 2.4 GHz, 32-177 on 5 GHz) is refused on the field instead of being saved and left to fail on the airframe.
Check the adapter took the driver
The image blacklists the stock Realtek modules and starts the radio only when a supported adapter appears, so a device with no radio does not fail on every boot. If the link never comes up, confirm the card bound to the wfb driver before changing settings:
iw devFlash your card in about 5 minutes
The Aircast Flasher downloads the image, sets Wi-Fi and hostname, and verifies the card.
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