User manual
Live
The Live cluster holds what you use during the event: the Live ops room and the Bodycam page for broadcasting from the phone. Everything you prepare before or consult after — channels and keys, connecting the drone, public events, recordings, the order log — lives in the Channels & archive area. The house rule does not change: minutes are counted on the channel that broadcasts, never on the viewers. Ten people watching cost the same as one.
The bodycam is the phone
From the Bodycam page, or from the channel's dialog in Channels & archive, every bodycam channel shows a button and a QR code. Point your phone at the code and the browser becomes a bodycam: no app to install, rear camera, the screen stays awake, and it reconnects automatically when the 4G wavers.
The link is signed and valid for eight hours, and it opens without a login: it is meant to be handed to whoever is in the field. Owners, Admins and Pilots can use it. The GPS position is sent at most once every fifteen seconds; the trail is kept according to the organization's retention — in search operations it is the document that says which sectors have been covered.
Everything the person holding the phone sees and does — orders from the control room with read confirmation, the backup recording, the MD alarm — is in the Bodycam chapter: it is the page to have your volunteers read before the shift.
The control room
The Live ops room puts the channels that are live on a tiled wall that refreshes itself every eight seconds: when a channel goes live the player attaches, when it stops it detaches. The wall has a maximum number of tiles per workstation; if there are more live streams, the others sit in the Live feeds list at the side, from which you open, close or pin a tile. At the top you read the minutes left and how many channels are broadcasting. If your session expires the wall tells you so and offers you the link to sign back in, instead of making everything look offline.
The operations map shows the positions of bodycams and drones with their trail over the past hour: the drone's dot comes from the GPS in the DJI telemetry. With several drones live at the same time and no certain link to the channel, the dot is not shown — better no dot than a dot on the wrong team. The dot also tells you what the unit is doing: solid when broadcasting, outlined when it only sends its position — the approach phase reads at a glance. You choose the map layout from the room: Side, Below, Hidden or Separate window, handy for the second monitor. Your organization's logo stays overlaid on the video.
With several distant incidents — two fires, three teams — the map is not left to chance: the director bar at the top chooses what to follow. All tracks every unit (the default); zones are born on their own when units cluster by distance (Zone 1 (3) means three units in the westernmost group) and one click follows just that one; clicking a dot follows that single unit; Manual leaves the map in your hands — and engages by itself as soon as you drag or zoom. The line under the map always says what is being followed. If the followed unit or zone disappears, the director honestly falls back to «All» instead of chasing a ghost.
Tiles of drones on air also show the aircraft's battery: the «can we or can't we» is decided from here too, without asking over the radio.
Tiles are born muted: the audio does arrive, but no browser will autoplay a video with sound. The Listen button opens the audio of one tile at a time — ten open microphones are not information — and opening one closes the others by itself. The organization profile also holds the Room audio option (listening for those not on air), off by default.
The Snapshot button saves a frame of the tile as a PNG: the quickest way to pin down what you have just seen. The snapshot does not end up in your Downloads: it enters the organization's archive with who took it, when, from which channel and where the framed unit was — it is evidence, not an image. From the archive, snapshots can also run the assisted people-and-vehicles count (covered in Channels & archive).
Viewer invites and controls
A channel is watched from outside through a viewer invite: a personal, revocable link, with optional expiry, access code and IP list, and an email notice when the channel goes live. Viewers do not consume minutes.
Viewer controls (School and ULTRA plans): on the invite you may grant the moviola — «−30 s» repeatedly, pause and scrub on the clip, «Back to live» — and the clip download as MP4. Whoever invites grants them; on school tasks the school decides.
Map markers
The room can pin the facts of the territory straight onto the map: the Marker button in the director bar arms the marking, you tap the map at the right spot, write an optional note («Roma street closed») and pick the icon. The vocabulary covers three families: emergencies (fire, flooding, landslide, hazard, road closed, first-aid point, missing person search), events (concert, demonstration, procession, festival, sporting event, market) and logistics (command post, assembly point, generic pin).
Placing and resolving a marker are director's acts — owners, admins and ops-room operators — and stay signed. The rule that matters: resolving is not deleting. A resolved marker leaves the live map, which always says what is there now, but stays in the activation folder with who placed it, who closed it and when. On the second monitor (the separate window) markers are shown read-only.
The bell: request the live feed
A unit sending only its position — the outlined dot — is on its way, but not broadcasting. The bell on its tile requests the live feed: on the operator's phone, if they use the Dronetrake Sync app in operator mode, the notification with their bodycam link arrives — one tap and they are on air. In the room the status says the thing worth knowing: requested, then delivered once the phone has actually received it; a request sent but never delivered is the moment for the radio. The request lasts ten minutes and can be cancelled. Bodycams only: a drone's live feed is commanded, not requested.
Activating the room, and the folder
When the room opens for a real event — an emergency, a public gathering, a drill — you open an activation: a name, a type (event, alert, search, drill, other), and from that moment everything born in the room carries its stamp: live sessions, recordings, snapshots, orders, alarms, markers. When it closes, the folder remains: the documentary account of the night, found under Archive → Folders (covered in Channels & archive).
Two rules always hold. First: the live feed never stops for paperwork — the activation adds context, it is not a precondition for working; whatever is born without an activation can be claimed afterwards, retroactively. Second: a drill stays marked as such everywhere, because a year from now nobody should wonder whether that night was real.
On opening, the room proposes the next steps from the facts — the joint operation if you are entitled to one, the contacts to call, the position-only units to ring the bell for. It is a suggestion of the moment: «Got it» dismisses it, nothing is mandatory.
For those coordinating several organizations there is also the activation chain — the Mayor activating the associations with SMS and tracked confirmation: that belongs to the ULTRA Room manual.
Giving volunteers the floor
From the phone a volunteer can ask for the floor. In the room the request joins a queue ordered by waiting time — whoever has waited longest sits on top, and the counter grows before your eyes. Give the floor does the three gestures in one: removes them from the queue, opens the tile and turns on listening for that channel. The request and its handling stay in the log, like everything else.
Talkback
The room can talk to volunteers: hold the talkback button and your microphone goes on air in the earpiece of whoever is in the field — to a single volunteer from their tile, or to everyone from the orders panel. Release, and the microphone closes: never a room microphone left open by distraction. The channel is prepared when you enter the room, so the voice leaves immediately instead of ten seconds later.
Did something just happen? The Replay button rewinds the tile by thirty seconds, repeatedly if needed, up to thirty minutes back: inside the clip you pause and scrub with the normal controls, and Download clip gives you the file to attach to a report. Back to live returns to the live feed instantly, because the live stream underneath never detached. Replay exists only on your own organization's channels: the archive of an organization sharing with you remains theirs.
Orders to volunteers
The Messages to volunteers panel sends orders to the bodycam screens — to one volunteer, to a group picked with the recipient chips, or to all — with the quick orders or free text. The quick orders are customized from the organization profile, Integrations section: up to eight entries of your own, reorderable, which replace the six defaults (leave them empty and the defaults come back). A link pasted into an order arrives tappable on the phone: with Send support on an MD alarm, the order sets off already prefilled with the position.
On the phone the order vibrates, beeps and fills the screen until the volunteer taps CONFIRM READ; in the room every order shows its state: sent, delivered (the phone received it), read with the time. An order stuck on «sent» tells you that phone is unreachable: that is the moment for the backup radio. Every communication ends up in the Order log — the after-the-fact proof of what was ordered and when.
Silent mode reverses the direction of the caution: the notice reaches the phone with a short vibration and a small banner, no sound and no red — for when you do not want to expose whoever receives it. And when an MD (man down) alarm comes in from the field, the room shouts it with a sound and a red bar, shows the last position and allows a signed Take charge: the tick goes back to the phone of whoever called for help.
If a channel is set as the primary live channel on a mission template, its sessions join the active mission's dossier by themselves.
Minutes and credits
Minutes are consumed only while a channel is broadcasting, counted when the session closes. Watching costs nothing: viewers do not enter the count, and that is a product decision, not a technical detail.
Every new organization receives a one-off 60 welcome minutes if it registers a UAS operator code or is the student of a school with the programme on (signed up with its code), 15 minutes without. If you add the code — or join the school — later, the difference is topped up, once only. Minutes are credited to a verified phone number and do not expire.
Your plan adds a monthly allowance of live hours and a number of channels; packs you buy add to the plan and do not expire at month end.
On what happens when minutes run out, the whole truth needs telling. A new broadcast will not start: authorization is refused and the panel says the minutes are gone. And a broadcast already running is closed, but not abruptly: there is a five-minute grace beyond the remaining balance, then publishing is interrupted and Owners and Admins are notified. The one exception is a public event stream that started while there was headroom: that is never cut off halfway.
For events the allowance is in GB delivered, not in minutes, and it is the only line that can go negative, precisely so an event in progress is never switched off. Beyond the credit limit, or after some days in the red, event mode stays suspended for new events until you top up — and the audience, in the meantime, simply sees "offline", never billing details.