redgridtactical

Most of the conversation around counter-drone is about the defeat side but honestly the bigger problem is coordination. If you have a drone sighting, how do you actually tell someone else exactly where it is?

Thank you!

Yeah exactly. Apple has a history of quietly changing undocumented behavior between point releases. Building on top of that is asking for a fun debugging session six months from now. The GATT handshake adds a couple seconds of latency on reconnect but at least I know it won't break with iOS 19.

Nice list, thanks. Meshtastic bridge is on the V2.0 roadmap so the app can route through LoRa hardware for multi-kilometer range. Being able to detect and pair with these devices over BLE is exactly how I'd want the integration to work.

Hadn't seen that repo, really interesting find. Using undocumented Continuity fields for discovery is tempting but I wouldn't want to build on something Apple could break in any iOS update. I'm doing a GATT characteristic handshake with a session-derived service UUID for re-identification after address rotations. Takes a couple extra seconds on reconnect but at least it's stable. Those Continuity protocol docs are useful regardless though, good to understand what Apple is doing under the hood.

Good call, I've looked at Meshtastic's approach. They use CoreBluetooth on iOS with a known GATT service UUID for discovery, which is basically what I'm doing now. The main difference is they're discovering LoRa radios (which have fixed BLE addresses) rather than other phones. Phone-to-phone is trickier because iOS rotates the BLE address every ~15 minutes for privacy, so you can't really rely on address-based reconnection. You end up needing to encode enough identity into the GATT characteristics that peers can re-identify each other after an address rotation. Curious to see if anyone's found a cleaner approach for that.