An ESP32-C5 is now receiving and demodulating 5 GHz analog FM drone video. The project, built by Twotoz, runs on a Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C5 board and uses a resistor-ladder DAC to produce the video signal. The code is public on GitHub under the repo C5VRX.
Analog FM video survives in FPV drone racing because it has no digital cliff-edge dropout and delivers lower latency than any digital alternative. The 5 GHz band is the key detail here: it confirms the ESP32-C5's recently revealed hidden SDR capability extends to that frequency range, not just lower bands. The receiver includes a button-based channel selector and a serial interface for deeper configuration.
The open question this project does not yet answer is whether the ESP32's SDR processing pipeline introduces enough latency to make FPV flight impractical. That is the reason to read the full write-up and watch the linked repository for updates. The hardware cost is low enough that anyone with a Xiao C5 board can test it themselves.
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