joshruby/nightjar-flight-20260804-3

nightjar flight — 2026-08-04, third sortie

Short verification sortie. Same rig and site as the other 2026-08-04 sessions. GPS truth: 1,997 valid UTC stamps of 1,998.

airborne	200 s
max height	14 m
max slant range	142 m
median elevation angle	6°
path flown	357 m

Why this session exists

It verifies a two-stage fix to the cued zoom climb. The cue's containment focal (~7.07 mm from FOV ≥ 2·k·σ) had been computed on every cue and never commanded; when that was fixed, the climb then ran at full lens speed into a 1 mm deadband and overshot. This session carries the proportional-speed correction. Measured against the 7.07 mm ceiling:

SEARCH focal	previous sortie	this sortie
median	10.88 mm	5.93 mm
p90	11.80 mm	10.92 mm
max	20.03 mm	10.92 mm

The long overshoot tail is gone and the median now sits just under the ceiling instead of 54% above it. Zoom also climbs on tracks properly here: TRACK median 2.37×, p90 9.90×, max 20.27×, with 39.7% of the flight above 2× and 6.9% above 5×.

What this session does NOT show

⚠ At 14 m altitude and a 6° median elevation angle the drone was on the treeline, against foliage rather than sky, and never got past 142 m. Detection read 31% inside 50 m and 0% beyond — same as every other sortie that day — and the tracked median range was 19 m. So this data verifies camera behaviour only. It says nothing about the 50–150 m detection problem, and it sits at the null of a horizontal array's elevation response (sensitivity goes as sin(el)), so it is also a poor test of acoustic elevation.

Cue gate

8 cue candidates, 3 chirp-rejects, all 8 at the relaxed 10.0 dB threshold — nightjar was never in TRACK when a cue was evaluated. A state-dependent presence gate (14.6 dB while tracking, 10.0 while searching) was live; audio/cue_log.jsonl now stamps thr_db and nj_state on every candidate so each cue is attributable to the threshold that produced it.

Contents / gotchas

audio/uma16_<epoch>.wav   UMA-16, 16 ch, S16_LE     audio/sb_<epoch>.wav  SB-POLARIS, 8 ch, S32_LE
audio/cue_log.jsonl       cue gate log (thr_db, nj_state per candidate)
video_segments.tar        1080p native + 768x432 substream, 60 s MPEG-TS
blackbox/state.jsonl      tracker FSM ~2.9 Hz    blackbox/frames.tar  substream stills f<epoch_ms>.jpg
dji/*.csv, *.txt          decoded + original FlightRecord (CUSTOM.dateTime = true UTC)

UMA-16 0-based channel 9 is a dead electronic-floor channel — exclude it, run on 15. SB-POLARIS has 3 live capsules of 8; detect them by RMS (live ~−70 dBFS, dead ~−190) rather than hardcoding. ⚠ The arrays use different sample widths — UMA S16_LE, SB S32_LE; reading both as int16 scrambles SB channel identity and destroys its spectrum.

Calibration as flown: az_offset_deg 301.37, invert_az true (re-solved from the JBL beacon that afternoon, 0.40° drift). Cue producer: cheap daemon (SUBHUNT=0). Site notch 100–200 Hz. Start pose pan 178.9 / tilt 45, pointed at the JBL beacon.