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 a...
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 an...
2025-01-05 00:02:54 +0000 UTC View PostHi 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 soft...
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 yo...
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 ...
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 crea...
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
2023-08-17 09:40:13 +0000 UTC
View Post
![Frustum Culling [testing help wanted]](https://img5.samukata.com/storage/8/ya/gt/4e9b88-019e8356-66d9-7812-b29e-a6f83d05436e.gif)
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 ...
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 ...
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 we...
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!
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 issues
For several months we...
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...
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 radiosonde...
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 ...
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<...
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 b...
2022-09-16 23:37:32 +0000 UTC View PostBefore 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 d...
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 an...
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 2022-04-22 22:04:29 +0000 UTC View Post
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 deployment of the DB....
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. 2022-03-18 08:26:27 +0000 UTC View Post
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 co...
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 a...
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 t...
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 select...
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 ...
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, s...
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), whi...
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 en...