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sondehub posts

Posts: 42 Files: 14

webhorus and webwenet

A quick little update of something we've added for amateur sondehub users - web based decoders for horus and wenet.webhoruscan demodulate horus binary 4fsk and upload to sondehub using either input from a sound card (most browsers) connected to an SSB radio or from an RTL-SDR (Chrome only). Mark's made a demo v...

Graw sponsorship 2025, SondeHub Tracker updates and KA9Q support in radiosonde_auto_rx

Hi all!Apologies for the long time between updates here - we really appreciate your continuing support!Once again we are very happy to announce that GRAW Radiosondesare continuing their support of SondeHub. Their generous support allows us to keep SondeHub running and available to everyone. Without their support it wou...

DFM-17/DFM-09 mis-identification

Hi all,We are starting to see misidentifications of DFM-17 sondes as DFM-09 sondes becoming more prevalent over the US.We're working through a few options for how to better handle mis-identification of DFM17 sondes (based on serial number amongst a few other things), but this will take time to implement, and will p...

March Updates

DiscordAfter having development discussions spread across multiple Discord servers for many years, we’ve decided to finally setup our own Discord server in an attempt to centralise things. We have channels for software development, and also general radiosonde hunting and amateur balloon launching discussion!If you’...

GRAW Radiosondes continues SondeHub sponsorship for 2024

I am very happy to announce that GRAW Radiosondes are continuing their support of SondeHub for 2024. We are very appreciative of their support in 2023 which has enabled many new features to be developed on SondeHub. Their generous support allows us to keep SondeHub free to use at the service level our users have come t...

Predictions - so many predictions

We recently made some changes to how our radiosonde predictions (for SondeHub not SondeHub Amateur) are delivered to clients.Previously the web client would request predictions for every single radiosonde. On the backend predictions are run on a schedule, so from a server load perspective having the client request all ...

New experimental APRS gateway features

APRS receiver positionsOur APRS importer should now import the positions of stations that receive balloon telemetry.APRS chase car positionsAdditionally appending "SHUB" or "SHUB1-1" to APRS paths will result in positions being uploaded to SondeHub as chase car positions.

Frustum Culling [testing help wanted]

In computer game development there is a fairly common optimisation called frustum culling.In the example above, the players camera is on the right. When the player moves their camera around the game engine stops rendering all the objects outside of the view of the camera. Since the player can't see behind them, the...

Why and how we block old software versions

SummaryIf you are using rdz_ttgo_sonde software - upgrade to 20230427 / 0.9.3 or beyond ASAP. Failure to do so may prevent uploads to SondeHub.Why and how we block old software versionsBlocking uploads from old versions is not something we like doing. We try to avoid it where possible. However in certain cases bugs in ...

New MQTT feeds for optimising the web interface

Back when SondeHub first got off the ground there were only a few tracking stations. We published all data to the web clients as it came in. Today there are 1300+ receiving stations feeding data and many older computers and mobile phones struggle with showing the unfiltered map.A longer term goal as we scaled up has be...

ARDC, Amateur tracker time periods, Amateur APRS-IS Gateway updates

Thanks for Mark (VK5QI) for writing todays patreon post!ARDC GrantBack in November 2022 we submitted a grant request to Amateur Radio Digital Communications, for funding for approximately 2 years of hosting costs. We are very happy to announce that our grant request was approved!https://www.ardc.net/apply/grants/2023-g...

What's been happening over Jan and Feb

Going to try to be brief (future me here - turns out this update was less brief than I thought it would be - we've been doing a lot!) because everything has been a lot lately but I wanted to cover some of the things we've been working on behind the scenes.MQTT WebSocket compression issuesFor several months we&#...

Map tile analytics

Hi all, We are currently looking into options for alternative map tile servers, however in order to do this we need to gain an understanding of how many tiles we are currently loading each month. To obtain this data we'll be temporarily capturing some very limited analytics. Data we will be capturing: - Number of ...

GRAW Radiosondes sponsors SondeHub

I am very happy to announce that we have a new sponsor and partnership for 2023, GRAW Radiosondes. You may have even had the chance to recover one of their DFM series of radiosondes. Their generous support allows us to keep SondeHub free to use at the service level our users have come to expect.We are looking forward t...

December updates

Logging reduction- Remove MQTT logs- Only log exceptions for ingestion- Moved monitoring dashboard to GrafanaOne thing that's always bugged me is how much we spend on logging useless info and the cost to have our pretty status monitoring dashboard. Fixing the first is a tricky problem as by default Lambda functions...

October updates

Listener websocketsA combined effort between Mark and I has moved listener (station) updates to via websockets now! This is a huge improvement in terms of cost and performance. When a chase car updates its position it should be reflected in the web tracker within a couple of seconds.Request countsWhile we can handle a ...

What's been happening?

It's been a little while since I've last posted, mostly because I've been busy, but that doesn't mean progress has stopped on SondeHub. Most of the teams effort has been in supporting the retirement of Habitat and Habhub.This has spawned a bunch of little jobs and projects such as : Documenting how Sond...

Grafana (trial/beta/something)

Before I kick off, I just wanted to mention that updates on the Patreon are probably going to be slow over the next months as I'll be travelling, but thats not to say progress on SondeHub will slow down. Mark and Luke are always improving the platform.Now onto Grafana. We've had a public OpenSearch cluster for ...

ARDC + AREG support

Eagle eyed users of SondeHub may of noticed some new logos on our loading screen from ARDC, AREG and of course Patreon. ARDC and AREG have teamed up to provide financial support for SondeHub. Between ARDC+AREG and our Patreon supporters we'll be able to ensure SondeHub remains operational for the at least the next ...

Amateur balloon tracker

For awhile I've mentioned that we've added endpoints in our API for tracking of amateur radio balloon launches, along with an APRS ingestion pipeline. Well we now have a tracker up!The tracker is available at https://amateur.sondehub.org/ and provides many of the features of the typical SondeHub tracker.Many th...

Database outage

We recently had a DB outage and I wanted to explain what went wrong.First some background. On Friday I upgrade our Elastic Search 7.9 cluster to OpenSearch 1.2 - this went well (however we are still monitoring performance of this change). This change was rolled out by myself manually. This was done to ensure a smooth d...

An update about prediction failures

We were alerted that predictions were old / delayed. Upon investigating it appears that over time the function that processes our predictions was taking longer and longer to process predictions. It appears that in some edge cases some radiosondes were causing Tawhiri (the software we use for predictions) was taking ove...

Amateur balloon tracking dashboards

We've been progressing a little bit on amateur balloon tracking and recently AREG launched a balloon "UPANDUP" which was tracked by several stations running the latest version of horus-gui which now contains support for SondeHub as an upload location.As an experiment I decided to play around with the Elasti...

Data transfer cost improvements

As SondeHub grows in the number of stations and the number of website users our data transfer costs increase. When there was only a handful for stations using SondeHub this wasn't a big deal but now that SondeHub but now that SondeHub is nearing 800 stations the data transfer fees are starting to add up. In the las...

XDATA and Radiosondy.info Recovery

XDATA Instrument DecodingThe radiosondes that we detect will sometimes include secondary instruments such as Ozone sensors which transmit their information via the XDATA protocol in telemetry. We can receive the raw transmitted XDATA values for RS41 and RS92 sondes with radiosonde_auto_rx with iMet-1/4 also coming soon...

Skew-T and Historic data

The SondeHub tracker has been updated this month gaining two new major features, viewing historical launch site data, and generating Skew-T plots. The historical launch site data allows you to plot the landing positions for all sondes assigned to a specific launch site. The launch site modal has been expanded to allow ...

Predictor performance improvements and ElasticSearch/Opensearch

Predictor UpdatesWe've been having issues with our home run predictor. When a prediction would run the server would lock and several requests would take a long time too come back. Previously we ran the predictor using a wind model that was shared via EFS (basically AWS managed NFS host). The predictor itself would ...

Infrastructure as code

I've had this week off from work so I've had a little bit of time to work on various parts of SondeHub. Most of the work I'm doing has been around cleaning up our terraform configuration. Terraform is the tool we use to manage everything that's deployed in AWS.Our infrastructure has lots of moving parts...

Reverse Predictions

Regular users of the SondeHub tracker will be familiar with the live flight-path predictions run for all radiosondes showing up on the map. These predictions are run using the 'Tawhiri' prediction software (developed by Cambridge University Space-Flight - CUSF), which itself uses the NOAA's Global Forecast ...

Predictions update

A feature we've been meaning to get to is showing predictions for longer. What do I mean by this?Previously predictions only used the last 5 minutes worth of data to generate a prediction, however this was based on current time. So if the radiosonde had not been received in 5 minutes then the prediction wouldn'...