Air operations & multi-drone coordination

When a search runs more than one drone, Eagle Eyes Mirada pulls the whole air picture into one window. Every aircraft that is livestreaming into Mirada shows up together, with its live position and telemetry, and every drone appears on the same map. This page walks through coordinating several drones at once — seeing them all, jumping between their feeds, and reading where each one is.

This page is about the overall picture across drones. For the mechanics of a single feed — connecting to it, watching, recording and detecting — see Viewing and coordinating live streams.

📷 Recording neededair-ops-jump-streamsSeveral drones flying and livestreaming at once, and switching the viewer between their feeds

All your drones in one list

Every live drone shows up in the Live section at the top of the sidebar. Each aircraft that is sharing its position or streaming into Mirada gets its own row, listed together — so with three drones in the air you see three rows.

A row tells you at a glance what that drone is doing:

• A red dot marks a drone that is streaming live right now.
• A row turns grey when a drone goes quiet, and drops off after it has been silent for a while. A +N old control at the top of the section brings the faded ones back if you need them.
• If a drone is recording or running detection on its feed, the row spells that out beneath the name.

The count beside the Live heading is how many drones are currently up.

📷 Screenshot neededair-ops-live-sectionThe Live section listing several drones at once

Reading each drone

Every drone in the list carries its own live information. Open a drone’s details to see its current telemetry:

• Coordinates and altitude — both above sea level (MSL) and above the home point.
• Heading (yaw), airspeed and battery.
• Sources — where Mirada is getting this drone’s position from, and how long ago it last updated, so you can tell which drones are genuinely live and which have gone stale.

Because the whole list updates in real time, a glance down it tells you which aircraft are flying, where each one is, and how much battery each has left.

Jumping between streams

The value of having every drone in one list is that you can hop between their feeds instantly. Click a drone that is streaming and the media viewer jumps straight to that aircraft’s live feed; the map recentres on it and locks on so it follows that drone as it flies. Click a different drone and the viewer switches to that feed instead.

So coordinating several aircraft is just working down the list: click one drone to watch its feed, click the next to check on it, and back again — without ever losing the others, which keep flying and keep their rows in the Live section.

If a drone is streaming but you haven’t connected to its feed yet, its row lets you request the stream; once it’s up, clicking the row jumps to it like any other. (The details of connecting are covered in Viewing and coordinating live streams.)

The whole picture on the map

The map ties it all together. Every live drone appears on it at once — each marker at that aircraft’s current position — so you can see where all of them are flying relative to the ground and to each other, not just one at a time.

Because Mirada shares a CalTopo map with the rest of the team, the drones are drawn over the same imagery, terrain and markers everyone else is looking at. Team members sharing their location through CalTopo show up on that map too, moving as they move — so the drones, the ground crew and the map are all referenced against one another in a single view. Setting up that shared map is covered in Connecting to CalTopo.

The map follows whichever drone you have selected in the list. To step back out and see every aircraft at once, press G — it zooms the map out to frame everything and releases the follow, so you get the full spread of drones over the map. Selecting a drone again locks the map back onto it.

Putting it together

With several drones in the air, the loop is: scan the Live list to see who’s up and how they’re doing, click a drone to drop into its feed, and read the map to keep the whole spread of aircraft in view. Everything stays live in the background, so you can move between drones as fast as the search needs.

Next: Viewing and coordinating live streams for working a single feed — connecting, watching, recording and detecting.