Going beyond Remote ID, miles beyond.
Drones are everyone's problem now. Commercial aircraft near flight lines. Small quads over crowds. Larger systems near forward operating sites. The market's answer is DroneID, a broadcast-only compliance standard that catches the aircraft that volunteer to identify themselves. Anything sub-250 g, anything with DroneID stripped, anything that simply doesn't comply: invisible.
Nimbus takes an different approach. It's a passive RF detection sensor that monitors the electromagnetic spectrum holistically, not exclusively for Remote ID. Nimbus looks for energy on frequency bands, timing signatures of TDD bursts, spacing parameters of OFDM subcarriers, and preambles of known drone protocols. Six layers of analysis fire in parallel and converge on a signal classifier in under a second. If the drone is in the air, Nimbus sees it. If the protocol is in our library, Nimbus names it. If we don't recognize the protocol yet, Nimbus still flags it as a likely drone, at the right confidence tier.
Six layers, one efficient decision tree.
Every signal Nimbus encounters passes through six layers of analysis. Each layer answers a different question, runs independently of the others, and contributes a piece of the operator's final verdict. If only the lower layers fire, Nimbus still reports the contact at the appropriate confidence tier.
Wideband energy detection across the 433 / 915 MHz and 2.4 / 5.8 GHz ISM bands. The trigger that fires everything downstream, in milliseconds.
Time-domain envelope analysis recognizes frame structure: OcuSync's 10 ms super-frame, PixSync's 54 ms paired heartbeat, the 2 ms hops of an FHSS RC toy. The family is classified before we touch a bit.
Subcarrier spacing, cyclic prefix length, and occupied channel width fingerprint the OFDM variant. Discriminates between, say, OcuSync 2.0 and OcuSync 4 before any preamble correlation runs.
Matched-filter correlation against the known-protocol library produces a confirmed classification: "Drone confirmed, OcuSync 4 class." Library refreshes over the air on every connected node. A fingerprint registered at one customer becomes detectable at every other customer within hours.
Cooperative receivers decode standard Remote ID over Wi-Fi Beacon, Wi-Fi NaN, and Bluetooth Long Range. For compliant aircraft this yields drone serial, drone GPS, and operator GPS. For non-compliant aircraft, the absence of a Remote ID broadcast is itself a tell.
A multi-panel switched directional array delivers angle of arrival on the emitter, compliant or not. Heading, dwell, and pattern over time turn a single fix into a track.
Three ways to field it.
Nimbus runs the same classifier and the same hardware everywhere. What changes is who's looking at the alert, where the corpus lives, and whether the node talks to anything outside its own subnet.
ATC towers, stadiums, data centers, critical infrastructure. A static mast watches the airspace 24/7. Managed FAA reporting and over-the-air library refresh available as a service.
Dismounted overwatch, FOB perimeter, vehicle mount. The air-gapped variant runs the same firmware and the same classifier with zero outbound telemetry. Connected variant available where policy permits.
The constantly-learning library. A novel protocol observed at one customer becomes detectable at every other customer in the fleet within hours. Phase 2 adds multi-node TDOA so any two sensors in range trilaterate a target.