A quick little update of something we've added for amateur sondehub users - web based decoders for horus and wenet.
webhorus can 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 video of this wor...
2025-03-29 23:01:25 +0000 UTC View PostHi 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 Radiosondes are continuing their support of SondeHub. Their generous support allows us to keep SondeHub running and available to everyone. Without their support it would be much harder to provide the services and features we do.
2025-01-05 00:02:54 +0000 UTC
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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 probably need software updates at a majority of stations to work.
For now, if you see a 'DFM09' with a serial number starting with 23 or 24 then it's most likely ...
2024-05-18 06:09:49 +0000 UTC View PostDiscord
After 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’ve previously linked your Patreon and Discord accounts ( 2024-03-12 23:45:31 +0000 UTC View Post
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 to expect.
We are looking forward to working and collaborating with GRAW Radi...
2023-12-31 13:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostWe 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 the data didn't create much additional load. However as the number of active radiosondes has grown over time, this has resulted in a larger and larger payload over time. ...
2023-10-08 04:09:48 +0000 UTC View PostAPRS receiver positions
Our APRS importer should now import the positions of stations that receive balloon telemetry.
APRS chase car positions
Additionally appending "SHUB" or "SHUB1-1" to APRS paths will result in positions being uploaded to SondeHub as ...
2023-08-17 09:40:13 +0000 UTC View Post
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, there's no point rendering all those extra bits of the game.
So what does thi...
2023-08-14 06:00:59 +0000 UTC View PostIf 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.
Blocking uploads from old versions is not something we like doing. We try to avoid it where possible. However in certain cases bugs in decoders and software result in incorrect data being uploaded to SondeHub. This can take ...
2023-07-12 06:46:36 +0000 UTC View PostBack 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 been to improve the web experience by only receiving and drawing the data that's relevant to the user. Most people only look at a small section of the map and don't require...
2023-06-14 00:50:05 +0000 UTC View PostThanks for Mark (VK5QI) for writing todays patreon post!
Back 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-grants/grant-balloon-tracking-platform/<...
2023-04-16 09:47:51 +0000 UTC View PostGoing 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 issues
For several months we've been running "per-message-deflate" on our WebSockets solution which powers our tracker page and third party access. This has save...
2023-02-15 08:49:09 +0000 UTC View PostHi 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 tiles loaded for each map layer + random ID for each browser session
Data we will NOT be capturing:
- Which specifi...
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 to w...
2023-01-01 01:00:01 +0000 UTC View PostLogging reduction
- Remove MQTT logs
- Only log exceptions for ingestion
- Moved monitoring dashboard to Grafana
One 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 log their start and stop execution details - a...
2022-12-22 10:34:45 +0000 UTC View PostListener websockets
A 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 counts
While we can handle a large number of requests we still get charged per request. It doesn't seem malicious and is likely fixed in our latest tra...
2022-10-17 02:44:04 +0000 UTC View PostIt'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 :
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 sometime now, and while it does allow users access to query the data and make visualisations, accessibility has always been an issue. It requires logging in and finding the data ...
2022-06-29 01:13:00 +0000 UTC View Post
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...
2022-05-21 23:20:21 +0000 UTC View PostFor 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 thanks t...
2022-04-22 22:04:29 +0000 UTC View PostWe 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 deployment of the DB.
Today during a deployment of some new amateur features to SondeHub (there will be some future posts about these) a terraform apply was executed...
2022-04-09 09:10:51 +0000 UTC View PostWe 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 over 30 seconds to process.
When we had several of these events occur at once i...
2022-03-18 08:26:27 +0000 UTC View PostWe'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 ElasticSearch dashboards that we cou...
2022-02-16 00:42:38 +0000 UTC View Post
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 last month alone we've picked up an extra 100 stations! Added to this when we migrated from habhub it was done in a way to minimize the time to switch over. APIs were rushed into produ...
2022-02-16 00:20:33 +0000 UTC View Post
XDATA Instrument Decoding
The 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. The DFM and M10/20 sondes also support XDATA ...
2022-01-29 06:53:19 +0000 UTC View PostThe 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 for a year and month selection of data to display.
The historical...
2021-12-26 02:36:46 +0000 UTC View PostPredictor Updates
We'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 memory map that file and read through it to provide a prediction.
I suspect the issue is with the way NFS and the Linux kernel locks the file during me...
2021-12-06 00:30:42 +0000 UTC View PostI'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, gateways, functions, CDNs, servers and everything in between. Each little aspect of our environment has many many many configuration options, like Python version, function name, ...
2021-10-28 22:57:44 +0000 UTC View PostRegular 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 Forecas...
2021-10-10 03:37:29 +0000 UTC View PostA 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't run. Some of our users enjoy trying to find radiosondes well after they've landed and after the radio transmitter had stopped so its necessary to have a good idea of where the...