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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.

Video without cellular0:44A link that needs no network, and a row that refuses to pretend it can send.

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

On the drone the transmitter listens on 5602. The number 5600 appears throughout wfb-ng's own documentation because those documents are written from the ground station's side. A drone sending to 5600 sends into a socket nobody is listening on, and the symptom is indistinguishable from dead 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

Open a camera on the Streaming page and look at Video without cellular. If the row is switched off, 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. Switch what carries video to the engine under the backend card on the same page, 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. Channel, region and transmit power live in the same place, and a channel outside your region's band plan 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:

On the device

iw dev

Nothing here replaces your other routes. A camera can publish to the cloud, your tailnet and the radio at once, and the radio is the one that survives when the network does not.

Flash your Pi in about 5 minutes

The Aircast Flasher downloads the image, sets Wi-Fi and hostname, and verifies the card.

Download the Flasher

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