Frequently asked questions

echoMike is a software suite for companies that run field work. Operations runs UK drone survey work end to end: planning, site intelligence, the PDRA-01 paperwork, flight clearance, logbooks, scheduling and billing. Crew is HR software for growing teams, and is in build.

No. They sit under one name, the echoMike suite, but they are separate applications with separate logins, separate data and separate billing. A survey firm can run Operations and never open Crew. A construction company can run Crew and never own a drone. If you end up using both, you sign in to each one. A link between them is on the plan rather than built, and we would rather tell you that now than have you find it out in week two.

We are a small team based in England, building echoMike alongside the companies who use it.

Operations has four plans: Starter, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Prices are still being reviewed, so we are not publishing them yet. Teams who join during the beta get preferential pricing when we do. Crew has no plans at all yet.

Yes. Organisations on the Operations beta have every feature switched on and nothing to pay, within the beta allowance of 10 GiB of storage and 5 seats.

Until the product is right for the teams using it. We will give you plenty of notice before anything changes, and paid plans come after that.

No. There is no card on file during beta, so you cannot be charged by surprise. We will always contact you before anything changes.

A seat is an active user. Someone marked as having left stops consuming one, so a leaver frees their seat up for the next person without a plan change.

UK drone and aerial survey operators, from a single pilot to a multi-crew organisation. It is written against the UK regulatory picture: PDRA-01, CAP2606 Annex 2, the CAA Operational Authorisation and Operator ID, NATS airspace and UK NOTAMs. Not bent to fit it afterwards.

Generic tools do not know what a flight area, an Operational Authorisation or a Confirm-to-proceed finding is, and none of them will tell you what is in the airspace above your site. Operations pulls the site data itself, holds every upcoming job against 18 PDRA-01 checks, records the clearance decision with your name on it, and assembles the CAA audit pack from those same records.

One Refresh on the pre-flight survey returns airspace and NOTAM hits with severity, distance and bearing; nearby schools, hospitals, GPs, care homes, venues, roads, railways, power lines, water and obstacles; the nearest hospital, police and fire station; active aerodromes nearest first; terrain elevation, slope, aspect and a profile; rural-urban class, population and land cover.

No. You get an Occurrence / Airprox report as a job document, captured against the job it belongs to. Submitting it to the CAA is still something you do yourself.

KML in and out for flight areas, TOAL zones, operational volume evidence and annotations; KMZ export for annotation groups, but KMZ import is not supported yet; CSV and TXT for control and survey points; JXL for site calibration and survey points; JPEG, PNG or WebP plus a world file for orthophotos.

Trimble JobXML (.jxl), CSV and TXT, several files at a time merging into one survey, with flexible column mapping. You can align vertically against earlier surveys on the job and read the delta distribution and RMS statistics. Exports are CSV, the Propeller two-file split, or the raw sources as a ZIP.

Yes. A Met Office seven-day outlook, an hourly flight-window chart with a limit line drawn from the lowest wind limit across the drones assigned to the job, radar and satellite imagery, and a Kp index gauge.

Three, and you connect them yourself: DJI for flight logs, from Pro upwards; Trimble Connect for survey data and ABAX for live vehicle tracking, trips and mileage, both on Business. Site data and Met Office weather come from our own geospatial service on every plan, so there is nothing to set up for those. A link across to echoMike Crew is on the plan and is not built yet.

Yes. Projects, jobs, flight areas, the Forms suite, readiness and clearance, survey import, equipment, calendar and billing all work on their own. Integrations add to that. They are never required.

Not yet. iOS and Android are being built, and we are not putting a date on them until we can hold it. The web app is properly responsive and installs to your home screen. There is no offline mode: a phone or tablet browser needs a connection to reach your jobs.

Not yet. Notifications are in-app today. Email and notification delivery is on the roadmap.

Companies of roughly twenty to a few hundred people, in any industry. Construction firms, agencies, professional services and field teams are all a good fit. It suits the point where people admin is a real job but nobody has been hired to do it.

Employee records with private fields kept private, configurable leave types with approvals and balances, unplanned absence with return-to-work and Bradford factor, policy versions with read-and-understood acknowledgements, onboarding and offboarding workflows, departments and locations, public holiday calendars, and an activity log of who changed what.

Reminders and approvals land in the app today, and email delivery is next. After that come reporting and data export, self-serve signup and billing, a mobile app and a public API. Payroll, performance reviews, recruitment, timesheets and expenses sit outside what we are building, so you keep whatever you already use for those.

Crew is in build now, and the beta list is the way in. Join it and we will get in touch as it opens up.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, every organisation is isolated from every other, and access is controlled by granular permissions rather than a single admin flag.

Each one keeps an audit trail. In Operations, flight clearances record who cleared the job, which findings they accepted by rule code, and the justification for any override; reading the log back is a Business-plan feature. In Crew, the activity log records the actor, the target and the field-level before and after.

No. We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information or the data you put into echoMike, and we do not use your data to train models for anyone else.

From Operations, yes. Surveys export as CSV, the Propeller two-file split or the raw source files as a ZIP, and spatial data exports as KML. Export from Crew is on the plan and is one of the next things we build.

Email us at support@echomike.app or use the contact form. While we are in beta you have a direct line to the team.

We usually come back to you within a couple of working days.

The Operations documentation is at /docs: 51 guides covering setup, planning, mapping, safety, records and administration. Crew documentation will follow once it is out of build.