AeroShield continually sweeps the RF spectrum in the bands of interest looking for potential drone signals. A mask violation is detected when a portion of the monitored RF spectrum exceeds a measurement mask requirement, such as the width, height and persistence criteria.

Setting the masks correctly is critical to achieving reliable results. Set a Mask Depth parameter to determine how aggressively you want to be in creating masks. See Table: Mask Depth Parameters. Generally, Low or Medium settings are good if you are in a rural area with little noise in the bands of interest. In a high noise environment, High or Very High settings are preferred. The higher the Mask Depth, the longer it takes to create the masks. A mask is created by using a Max Hold setting on the Remote Spectrum Monitor. When using a longer Max Hold, the noise floor rises.

When setting the Mask Depth, the dB offset is automatically set as indicated. This value can be overridden. Masks are created for each RSM simultaneously. It typically takes about 1 minute to create masks at Very High mask depth, even if there are a large number of RSMs in use.

Masks are stored in the configuration file. The configuration file is not automatically saved when the configuration changes, including when creating new masks. If you want to preserve masks, click save in the configuration menu.

The appropriate masks to use varies with time-of-day and day-of-week. There are more competing Wi-Fi signals that need to be masked out during the day, as opposed to the night-time hours and week-days vs. weekends. You can either re-create masks at set times during the day or week, or have a standard procedure where configuration files are loaded at set times of day in order to accommodate changing RF environments.