Technology — UAV-RT | Northern Arizona University

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Tag

The same lightweight VHF radio tag biologists already use — unchanged, no new hardware on the animal.

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UAV (drone + antenna)

Carries the receiver aloft. An antenna hangs below on a cable; onboard software pulls the signal out of the noise.

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Ground station

One handheld controller shows the live flight track and detection map — no laptop needed in the field.

Weak-signal detection

Wildlife tags are designed to be as light and long-lived as possible, so they transmit at low power and can't afford the circuitry that would hold pulse timing and frequency perfectly steady. That's the right trade-off for the animal, but it makes the signal faint and slightly unpredictable. A human listening on headphones, or a basic receiver, only catches one pulse at a time — miss it, and the tag might as well not be there.

UAV-RT's onboard software instead searches across a range of possible timings and frequencies, then mathematically combines several faint pulses into one clear signal — like stacking several blurry photos to get one sharp one.

4 dB detection gain ≈ 4x searchable area

Cumbria, UK · photo: Jess Stevens, University of Cumbria

Handheld ground controller showing a live flight track and signal-strength detection map

Flight & field controls

The vehicle can fly a preplanned search mission or be piloted manually. Either way, flight control, telemetry, and the live tag-detection map all run off one handheld controller — no laptop in the field.

Full operational readiness takes about 2–3 minutes after power-up.

One controller. No laptop. ~2–3 min to ready-to-fly.

Antenna & noise engineering

The drone's own motors and electronics generate radio noise that can swamp a faint tag signal. Hanging the antenna several meters below the airframe on a cable — either a slung monopole for maximum range, or a directional Yagi for bearing precision — moves it away from that noise.

Custom radio-shielding fabric around the airframe cuts self-generated noise further still.

~10 dB noise reduction — a big share of the system's total range gain

UAV-RT drone in flight over a Lake District valley, antenna cable visible below the airframe

Cumbria, UK · photo: Jess Stevens, University of Cumbria

UAV-RT drone with arms folded, packed into a backpack alongside a field notebook and binoculars

Portability

Remote sites don't have parking lots next to them. The vehicle's arms fold down so the whole system — drone, antenna, and controller — packs into a single backpack for the hike in.

No case to carry, no vehicle required to get close. If you can hike to the site, you can fly from it.

Folds down to backpack size — no vehicle access required

Four hard problems, solved once.

Tag