Because the agent on a drone makes a piece of gear that is SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO DETECT DEVICES, and makes it completely obsolete. If that doesn't go against RAI, I don't know what does. Thus the only logical explanation is that agents cannot run on drones.

But his drone is made of the finest Handwavium alloys! It's got to work!

To be honest, I don't even know why they have a separate signal detector at all (let alone one that sucks balls like the one in the book) because, well... *looks around conspiratorially* you kinda need to be able to detect the signal coming from a device to see it's icon.

I think the nice thing about the Radio Signal Scanner/Bug Scanner is that it essentially acts as a Matrix Perception check and a Trace Icon check at once. Since you need two MARKs on an icon to use Trace Icon, that is normally outside of the scope of a non-hacker's capabilities. While it is sometimes pretty obvious where the device an icon represents is physically located, there are times where it is not (i.e. listening devices, thus the name of the equipment).

Both of us agree that there are serious problems with the Technomancer.
As for the rest, we agree... Direct Connections are not DNI. However, a Datajack can provide both.

I'd argue that thousands of dollars of software on a thousand dollar device should be useful compared to a small sensor that costs a few hundred bucks.

A small single sensor Radio signal scanner, wall mounted, caps out at rating 4. That's $250 for the box, and $400 for the sensor, for a total of $650. That's capped out. You can go as cheap as an RFID Sensor Tag for $40, which can hold a rating 1 ($100) or 2 ($200) signal scanner.

The cheapest drone is $1,000 and includes a rating 3 sensor array, and Agents cost $1000 a rank, or double that for rating 4+. That means this trick costs $2,000 minimum.

More over, a radio signal scanner is a single sensor, while a drone houses a sensor array that includes 8 sensors, one of which might very well be a radio signal scanner, so it's not like the agent is magically adding new antenna to the drone, it's just acting smarter. And a cheap metalink commlink has the built in hardware to look for icons. It's a mater of having the software smart enough to take full matrix actions on it's own without human input. I admit, an Agent program is a lot of overkill, as it's capable of so much more on the proper hardware, but it does get the job done.

The sensors are cheap easy to use detectors. The drone & agent is a robot with added matrix AI set to look for illicitly radio signals, and can cost 10 time as much. I don't think I'm breaking the rules or the game if it's more effective.

If you're a corporate spider, you'd probably just use the radio signal scanners, unless you facility is high security, in which case throwing a few thousand dollars at the concept might be something you can get approval for.

It's also got downsides beyond price, as I've pointed out before. The agent program is not protected by the Host, while the signal scanners are. The signal scanners are sharing their spotting information with the host, while the agent is not.

You seem very sold on this idea. I really don't think its RAW, but it could be interesting and I don't think there is anything I can tell you that will convince you its not RAW. So I guess you got to go for it.

Fair point. I'll fully admit it's almost certainly not RAI, but I don't think it's banned by RAW. That's probably not a good reason to say it's smart to allow in a game, but so far I haven't seen any game breaking reasons it can't be done. This is probably one of those "your millage may vary, but don't expect it to work in a missions game" areas of the rules, at least for now. I hope I didn't come across inappropriately in the debate, as I did learn more about the rules in the process of talking them out with you, which was the point of bringing it up. Had I seen anything that did outright ban it (as I did with using Agents for Full Matrix Defense) I would have dropped my argument. In other words, thank you for your input, I did/do consider it helpful, and apologize if I was rude in my defense of the idea.