DJI Aeroscope

The hardware comes in two main configurations. A fixed installation, typically pole- or roof-mounted, reaches out to about fifty kilometres in clear conditions and feeds a server that maps tracks in real time. A portable variant — a ruggedised case with a directional antenna — covers roughly five kilometres and is meant for mobile teams. Both decode the OcuSync and Lightbridge protocols that DJI uses across the Mavic, Phantom, Matrice and Inspire lines, which is to say, the dominant share of the world’s consumer drone fleet.

Civilian operators include aviation authorities and police forces in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel, as well as private security at stadiums and critical-infrastructure sites. Heathrow and Gatwick both moved to airfield-edge sensors after the December 2018 Gatwick shutdown. US federal prisons have used Aeroscope to identify contraband-delivery operators, several of whom have been prosecuted on the basis of recorded pilot tracks.

The system’s most consequential deployment has been in Ukraine, where both Ukrainian and Russian units have used it since 2022 to localise enemy drone teams flying Mavic 3s over the line of contact. The asymmetry of access became a public dispute: Kyiv accused DJI of leaving Russian Aeroscope units active while restricting Ukrainian ones, and the company eventually said it would deactivate the product in the warzone, citing an inability to ring-fence access by side. Front-line units on both sides have since adapted by switching to non-DJI airframes or modified firmware that suppresses the broadcast.

DJI announced in early 2024 that Aeroscope would be wound down as the global Remote ID standard takes over the function it pioneered. The product nevertheless set the template — passive, signal-intelligence-driven counter-drone detection — that a generation of Western counter-UAS vendors now builds against.