02 · Deployment

What to expect when deploying.

Hover is a managed service. The cloud side is ours. The field side is a pre-imaged Toughbook and a one-page deployment guide. A typical rollout takes hours.

What we provide

What your team handles

The rough timeline

Phase Time What happens
Discovery ~30 min call Your drone, your uplink, your command-post setup, your customers' privacy and evidence requirements. We send back a deployment plan.
Provisioning 1 business day We provision your session credentials, your public-viewer URL, and your release artifacts.
Field install ~1 hour, on-site Toughbook on drone network, internet uplink up, proxy installed, drone discovered. Your team can do this; we can be on the phone.
Operator install ~15 minutes MSI runs on the command-post laptop. GCS connects to 127.0.0.1. Video plays.
First flight test 1 sortie Verify on a real flight. Read the loss chart on the operator's admin page. Confirm recording is hitting the SD card.

From kickoff call to live drone feed in a command post is typically a week, most of which is waiting on hardware shipping or your IT department. The actual install is on the order of two hours including a flight test.

What this looks like for the operator. They open Mission Planner, select UDP at 127.0.0.1:14550, and tell their video viewer rtsp://127.0.0.1:5554. Same workflow as if the drone were on the desk. The relay is invisible to them when it's working — and the admin page on port 8081 is what they look at when it isn't.

Adding more drones, more sites, more agencies

Each Active Client Deployment runs in its own session — its own credentials, its own public viewer URL, its own admin pages. The pricing page covers per-drone economics. Adding a deployment is provisioning + a field install; it does not require a new contract round.

Multi-tenant management — a single dashboard across many deployments — is on the roadmap, not in production today. For now, agencies running multiple deployments get separate admin URLs.

What happens when something breaks

The cloud relay is monitored by us; if it goes down, we know about it before you call. For the field side, the operator's admin page is the first place to look: live logs and a real-time loss chart make most issues obvious without anyone needing to SSH anywhere.

Remote support during live deployments — graduations, demonstrations, anything where uptime is non-negotiable — is available on request. See the pricing page for terms.

What about credentials, encryption, and what we log?

Security →