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CG Drone Hunter — How-To Guide

A counter-drone RF/SIGINT app for Android. Operational build — it opens straight into a live map of your location and the real signals around you. No demo data, no simulation; everything shown is actual over-the-air activity.

Current build: v5.3 · Android 8.0+

1Install & first launch

Download the APK from the PDL Deploy homepage, or the direct shortcuts /android / /app (always point at the current version).
It's sideloaded, not from the Play Store — Android will ask to confirm "install from this source" the first time. Approve it.
On first launch, grant Location and Nearby Devices permissions when prompted. Without these, WiFi/BLE scanning and GPS-based features won't run.
The app opens directly onto the live map and starts scanning WiFi + BLE for drone Remote ID, plus acoustic sensing, immediately — there's no setup wizard to click through first.

2The home screen

The home screen is task-first — plain-language mission cards instead of a wall of settings:

Find Drones · Aircraft · Ships · Phones & Towers · Mesh Radios · Scan Everything

Tapping a mission card starts WiFi + BLE scanning plus whatever specialty receiver that mission needs. Every individual decoder is also available on its own under the Advanced menu.

3What works with just the phone — no SDR needed

Drone Remote ID over WiFi and Bluetooth LE — the FAA-mandated broadcast most consumer drones transmit (position, and operator/home position where the drone includes it).
Acoustic detection — a trained model (YAMNet backbone) listening on the phone mic, classifying drone / aircraft / non-target sounds (~92% drone recall in testing).
GPS-tracker heartbeat detection.
Multi-target tracking with threat scoring and geofence-breach alerts — runs on whatever signals are currently available, phone-only or SDR-augmented.
Cross-peer multilateration — when you and 2+ other linked sensors (including this phone itself, which counts as its own node) see the same position-less emitter, the app fuses the independent RSSI-range observations into one triangulated fix instead of separate markers.
On-device sensor health scoring — the app watches its own detection cadence for anomalies using a trained behavioral model, the same one used on our RID ground-sensor hardware line.

4Adding an RTL-SDR

Plug a standard RTL-SDR dongle into the phone via a USB-OTG adapter/cable and the radio decoders below come up automatically — no manual configuration required.

Drone-specific

Capability	What it gives you
MAVLink telemetryLIVE	Position/status from hobbyist & enterprise drones running ArduPilot/PX4.
FPV / ELRS & CrossfireLIVE	FHSS (frequency-hopping) de-hop for popular FPV racing/long-range control links.
OcuSync burst detection (DJI)LIVE	Detects the OFDM-shaped burst DJI's OcuSync downlink produces and flags it as a likely DJI drone. This is presence detection, not full telemetry — see the hardware-gated note below for why.
ESC motor RPMLIVE	Harmonic-comb tracker picks up a drone's motor-controller RF harmonics and estimates RPM.
Direction findingLIVE	Heading + RSSI bearing toward an emitter.

Airspace, maritime & comms situational awareness

Capability	What it gives you
ADS-B / Mode S / UAT / VORLIVE	Aircraft around the area — useful context for a drone incident near an airport or flight path.
AIS / DSCLIVE	Ships in range (marine VHF).
Inmarsat STD-C / Aero, 406 MHz SARSATLIVE	Satcom traffic and emergency beacons.
POCSAG / FLEX paging, APRS, RDSLIVE	Paging and amateur/broadcast metadata.
DMR / P25 Phase 1 / TETRALIVE	Digital voice & trunked radio — source/destination radio IDs, talkgroup, colour code (DMR); NAC + frame type (P25); country/network codes + colour code (TETRA). Every decode is FEC/CRC-verified before it's shown — metadata only, no voice content.
ACARS / VDL2LIVE	Aircraft datalink messages.
Weather-radio SAME/EASLIVE	Emergency alert broadcasts.
ISM / TPMS censusLIVE	Generic 433/868/915 MHz ISM devices and tire-pressure sensors. Uses a throttled-repost model, so a device that's still present keeps showing on the map instead of vanishing after its first sighting.
LTE cell decodeLIVE	Tunes to the exact channel-centre frequency (EARFCN-exact) and does channel-equalized system-info decode of nearby LTE cells.
NOAA APT weather-satellite imagery, Iridium paging censusLIVE	Broader SIGINT breadth that comes along for free with an RTL-SDR — not core to the drone mission, but real and working since the app already owns the RF front end.
Morse/CW & RTTY readout, wM-BusLIVE	Readable on-screen decode.

Supporting capabilities across all of the above

Modulation classification — a trained transformer (falls back to an analytic classifier if its weights aren't loaded) names the modulation of a signal once a real device or burst has already been found in that scan — it doesn't guess on empty spectrum.
RF fingerprinting / SEI — identifies an emitter by its hardware signature, not just what it transmits, and clusters repeat sightings from the same physical device within a session.
Fusion — cooperative-subtraction plus an ISM noise gate keeps the map clean; the on-screen brain icon shows fusion status and marks known-benign emitters.
GNSS jamming detector (always on) and an opt-in GNSS spoofing detector, kept separate since spoofing calls are lower-confidence by nature.

Ready for hardware — not live on a standard RTL-SDR: a few capabilities are built and tested but genuinely can't run on a 2.4 MHz RTL-SDR dongle, so they're honestly non-functional until the right SDR is attached:

Full DJI DroneID decode (serial, drone/pilot/home GPS) — the burst-presence detection above is live, but decoding the actual payload needs a wideband SDR that can capture the full 10–40 MHz OcuSync downlink; a 2.4 MHz dongle only sees a slice of it.
MUSIC angle-of-arrival — needs a coherent multi-channel array (KrakenSDR-class), not a single dongle.
Analog FPV video OSD reading — needs a wideband demodulator to pull the on-screen-display text off an analog FPV feed.
Cellular-drone heuristic — same wideband-capture constraint.

5Cooperative sensor network

Multiple phones/sensors running CG Drone Hunter (or our RID ground-sensor hardware) can link as peers. When 3+ linked nodes see the same position-less, signal-strength-bearing emitter within about 15 seconds of each other, the app fuses those independent observations into one triangulated position fix instead of showing uncorrelated markers per sensor. Most useful with more than one phone/sensor covering overlapping ground.

6Optional antenna & hardware upgrades

Nothing below is required — the app is fully functional on just the phone, and an RTL-SDR's stock antenna works fine for general use. CG Drone Hunter spans an unusually wide frequency range (roughly 25 MHz–6 GHz across all its decoders); no single antenna is optimal across all of it, so here's where a swap actually helps if you want more range on something specific.

If you mainly care about…	Optional upgrade
Drone Remote ID (WiFi/BLE)	None needed — uses the phone's own antenna, not the SDR.
ADS-B (1090 MHz aircraft)	A dedicated 1090 MHz antenna (quarter-wave ~6.7 cm whip or a colinear) — the single highest-value swap if aircraft range matters.
AIS (162 MHz marine)	A marine-band VHF antenna, mounted higher/outdoors if possible — AIS range is very sensitive to antenna height/line-of-sight over water.
DMR/P25/TETRA, paging (VHF/UHF, ~150–500 MHz)	A wideband discone antenna (~25–1300 MHz) covers most of these plus ADS-B/AIS reasonably well without swapping per task.
LTE cell decode (700–900 MHz)	A cellular-band antenna. Worth noting: the phone's own built-in cellular radio is far more sensitive than an RTL-SDR with any antenna, so this isn't a gap for basic coverage awareness.
FPV/ELRS/Crossfire (900 MHz / 2.4 / 5.8 GHz)	Band-specific antenna matched to the FPV band you're targeting — 5.8 GHz FPV video in particular is well outside what a general discone covers well.
Weak/distant signals generally	An RTL-SDR with a bias-tee output can power an inline LNA at the antenna — helps more with genuinely weak signals than a bigger antenna alone.

Practical recommendation: a wideband discone is the best single general-purpose upgrade. If you specifically care about aircraft range, a dedicated 1090 MHz antenna is the highest-value single-band swap. Everything else is genuinely fine on the stock antenna.

7Getting updates

All builds live on the PDL Deploy homepage. The current version carries a visible "Uploaded" date badge; prior versions stay listed underneath for rollback. /android and /app always redirect to whatever's current, so those are the easiest links to bookmark.

⬇ Get the current build