Drones deployed in combination with wireless sensors can unlock a host of prospective applications in
environments that lack infrastructure communications networks and where access may be impossible for
human operators. Community building efforts to engage with this opportunity are hampered by a lack of
platform support and an evolving understanding of the performance of known wireless communications systems
in dynamic outdoor environments, particularly under mobility. This paper proposes and evaluates a new
combination of ultra-wide band and wake-up radio technologies. These enable high precision landing and
support energy efficient operation. We describe in detail the design and implementation of an open platform
making use of the combination of these radios to improve upon ranging, bandwidth and energy efficiency
problems that affect drone–wireless sensor systems. Our evaluation shows how established ideas including low
power listening and receiver-initiated data transfer compare with using a wake-up radio. We show that the
energy efficiency of the localization–acquisition cycle can be improved by up to 62% with respect to a duty
cycle approach. Our experimental evaluation also shows two orders of magnitude improvements in power
consumption, from 190 𝜇W to 2 𝜇W, in non-ranging quiescent states on the sensor side.