Drone on the map

Every QSAR drone shows up on the team map two ways, with no extra hardware and no per-flight setup:

Position — the drone appears as an icon that tracks it in near real time, fed automatically from Skydio Cloud.
Live video — color and thermal camera streams, watchable from the video list in ATAK/iTAK.

Verified live 2026-07-08: drone over Quinhagak → video playing in the team’s iTAK within seconds.

How the video actually flows (worth understanding)

The drone does not send video to our server directly. It streams to Skydio Cloud over Starlink, and our TAK server pulls the stream from Skydio Cloud whenever someone opens it. That means:

Pilots: nothing to configure on the controller for video. Fly. On a standard flight, start the livestream when you want eyes on you (Remote Ops flights stream automatically from prep to landing).
Watchers: open the video list in ATAK/iTAK and pick the drone. The stream name matches the drone’s name on the map — see quinhagak-a flying on the map, open the quinhagak-a stream. Every drone also has a -thermal twin (the heat camera — the night/water search tool). If the app asks for a video login, it’s the skydio account (password from the admin); it remembers after the first time.

Every drone in the QSAR inventory (all twelve, in every village) is permanently in the video list. A stream only plays while its drone is actually streaming — “no video” just means that drone isn’t up.

Position (CoT) — automatic, nothing for pilots to do

Drone positions come from Skydio Cloud. As long as the drone has a connection (Starlink/Wi-Fi/5G), it shows up on the team map on its own — no controller setup, no per-flight steps. This covers every flight, including dock and Remote Ops flights where nobody is holding a controller. Video works the same way (see above), so a normal flight is: fly, and the team sees you and your video.

The drone’s name on the map comes from its name in Skydio Cloud (Fleet), and that same name is its video-stream name — which is what lets a watcher match the map icon to the right stream.

Offline fallback (admins only)

The controller has its own built-in position feed — Sharing → ATAK CoT → Publish Telemetry — that goes straight to our server without Skydio Cloud. We keep it turned OFF in normal operations (leaving it on would put a second, duplicate icon on the map for the same drone). It exists as a break-glass option for a mission where the cloud link is down but the controller can still reach the server over the local network. Turning it on is an admin call, not a routine pilot step — see the runbook.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Check
Drone not on the map	Does the drone have a connection (Starlink/Wi-Fi/5G)? Does it show as online in Skydio Cloud? Position comes from the cloud, not the controller.
Map name doesn’t match the stream name	The name comes from the drone’s name in Skydio Cloud (Fleet) — rename it there so the map icon and its video stream match; ask the admin.
Drone on the map, no video in the list entry	Is the pilot actually livestreaming? Standard flights need the pilot to start the stream; check the drone shows as streaming in Skydio Cloud
Video plays then blips out briefly	Normal — the X10 reconnecting between radio/Wi-Fi/5G; it comes back on its own
Video asks for a login	`skydio` account — password from the admin/password manager
Nothing works after it worked before	Admin: check `mediamtx` on the server, and that the Skydio API token is still valid (runbook §Skydio)

For admins

Server-side details (Skydio Cloud settings, API token, adding a new drone to the list) live in the runbook: server/VPS-DEPLOY.md §Skydio. The controller’s own RTSP settings screen is a dead end for our setup — don’t configure it; video rides through Skydio Cloud.

“Where it has been”

The live trail is automatic. A saved, replayable track for post-mission review (and KML export) is the mission logger — see Mission logger.