● Live · SkyLive

Live from 4 km above the drop zone — 14 ms behind reality.

The reveal

No flight controller. No BEC. No solder on the sender. Four parts.

Every FPV builder expects a flight controller, a voltage regulator, a rat's nest of solder. There is none of it here — a radio, a camera, a battery, and a button, joined by three lever clamps. The restraint is the engineering.

The SkyLive sender exploded into its four parts — radio, camera, battery, button — plus Wago lever clamps and screws.
The hardware

The sender, in your hands.

A GoPro-form-factor transmitter that rides on the helmet. Drag to inspect it, or pull it apart to see what's inside.

SkyLive sender — interactive 3D model (drag to rotate)

drag to rotate · toggle assembled ↔ exploded

The physics

Five numbers the whole design hangs on.

One exact figure each — the small, deliberate numbers a build quietly depends on. Sourced where sourced, modelled where marked, honest either way.

R 1.55
The nose that matches the cable exactly.
The antenna cable drops all the way down into a round seat with clearance — insertion never fights the print. Then the T-piece's stem lands on it: a convex nose of radius 1.55 mm, precisely the cable's own radius, so it cradles instead of cutting. Two vertical M2 screws pull that nose 0.4 mm onto the cable — the screws are the clamp, measured 1:1 off a working reference build. A yank on the antenna loads the printed wall and the bolted nose, never the connector.
−0.2 mm
The squeeze standard (where squeezing is right).
The battery-lead saddles are under-sized by a tiny, deliberate amount: 0.2 mm less than the wire they hold. It's the line between gripping and crushing. The antenna clamp deliberately does NOT use it — coax hates being squeezed by tolerances (it detunes), so there the seat has clearance and two screws deliver a controlled, serviceable clamping force instead. Same goal, two honest mechanisms.
90°
The turn that dodges the null.
The omni doesn't stand upright like on an FPV quad — its coax runs horizontally through the case wall and the bell sits directly against it, axis pointing straight through the wall. An upright omni's donut pattern has nulls straight up and down: in head-up or head-down freefall that aims a blind spot exactly at the receiver. Laid sideways, the donut fires down, up and all around — signal toward the ground in every jump attitude. And the strain relief becomes trivially simple: the cable never turns, so the T-clamp just drops onto it and screws shut.
14 ms
Glass-to-glass latency.
From the lens in freefall to the picture on the ground TV is about 14 milliseconds — faster than a blink, faster than you can perceive as delay (manufacturer figure). It's not the internet and it's not a stream; it's a private digital radio link with nothing in the middle to buffer. The jump you watch on the screen is the jump happening in the sky, in the present tense.
4 parts
No flight controller. No BEC. No solder on the sender.
The entire transmitter is four things — a radio, a camera, a battery, and a button — joined with three lever clamps and not one soldering-iron joint on the power side. Every FPV builder expects a flight controller, a voltage regulator, a rat's nest of solder; there is none of it here. The restraint is the engineering: fewer parts, fewer failure points, re-openable in seconds.
The depth

Show above, build below.

Everything above is the pitch. Everything below is the whole build — the chronological plan, the step-by-step assembly, the full bill of materials with dimensioned alternatives, the RF link-budget model, and the German-law reality. All install-free, all in the open.

More demos

Play the jump — a body is a shadow.

Radio doesn't go through a person well (−10…−15 dB). Spin the jumper and watch each antenna's coverage move with the pose: the down patch aims a cone at the ground until the body swings it away; the donut omni fires down + up past the body. You screw on one per jump; the aimed, 4-way-diversity ground array holds the rest.

BELLY
4000 m · FREEFALL
LIVEBELLY · FACE DOWN00:12:04
NO SIGNALantenna blocked by body
LINK
100%
● LIVE — image holdsdrop < 25 %
One antenna per jump, swapped by hand — no electronic switch on the sender.
The 4-way-diversity ground array (aimed patch + omnis) rides the best branch.
Drag the jumper · or pick a pose · then try the down patch
Interactive

Spin the hardware. Read the millimetres.

The real CAD, live in your browser — assembled, exploded, and the Mini, with dimension tags on the geometry itself. Plus the antenna decks that argue the RF doctrine.

🧊
3D Lab
850 · exploded · Mini — orbit + mm-hotspots
🪂
Freefall Simulator
ride the link budget from 4 000 m to the deck — pose by pose
🚧
Gate Simulator
drag the parts, break the rules — watch the export get refused
📡
Dual-antenna deck
the interactive RF argument (EN ·
DE)
🪂
Pitch deck
the whole story, presentable (EN ·
DE)
Explainers

The idea, the journey, the budget, the heat.

The supporting figures — from "a dot in the sky" to the full 4 km link budget and the passive-thermal doctrine.

Left: what the ground sees today — a dot in the sky. Right: what SkyLive shows — the freefall POV live on a monitor, same moment.
A dot — or the whole jump. Today the ground sees a speck; SkyLive puts the jumper's own view on the screen ~14 ms later.
The signal's journey: camera, 1 W radio, antenna, 4 km of air, ground antennas, receiver, HDMI, to the big TV — about 14 ms.
The whole path the picture takes — helmet to the waiting-room TV, about 14 ms end to end.
Link budget closing 4 km: +30 dBm transmit, −119.8 dB free-space loss, honest RX gain, −90 dBm conservative threshold — head-down closes with about +9 dB, belly rides the threshold; a model, not a measurement.
Closing 4 km of sky — a link-budget model, not a measurement. When the numbers got worse, the worse numbers got published. Full model, pose tables & every assumption in build/rf →
119.8 dB
FSPL @ 4 km
≈ +9 dB
head-down margin · calc
~13 W
waste heat @ 1 W
~14 ms
latency
1 W
TX power
Passive thermal with an operating doctrine: 25 mW on the ground, 1 W only at door-open — in freefall the ram-air carries the 13 W of heat; off within 60 s after landing.
Passive thermal with an operating doctrine — vents, a thermal pad, the 200 km/h wind, instead of a fan.
Ground-station diversity: wide omni plus aimed patch, the receiver takes the stronger one.
Ground-station diversity — a wide omni plus an aimed patch; the receiver takes the stronger branch.
Latency: ~14 ms, before you blink; the old way is footage after landing.
~14 ms — before you blink. The old way is footage after landing.