March Updates

Discord

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 ( https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-link-your-96158411 ) then you will have already been added to our server. If not, you can join with this invite link: https://discord.gg/9PQuq5jUGR

SondeHub Logo

If you’re been looking at the SondeHub or SondeHub-Amateur tracker recently, you might have noticed a change in the logo! Our logo originally comes from the HabHub project, and was designed by members of Cambridge University SpaceFlight (CUSF), and we thank them for making such a cool balloon logo! Since the main developers of SondeHub live in Australia, we decided to ‘localise’ the logo a little, keeping the style but ‘spinning the globe’ over to our part of the world. You’ll find both the old and new logos continue to be used throughout the SondeHub websites.

TTN / Helium

We’ve noticed some interest in using LoRaWAN trackers on The Things Network and the Helium Network for tracking high-altitude balloons, in particular floater payloads.

To help make getting telemetry from these payloads into SondeHub-Amateur as easy as possible, we’ve built gateways for both of these networks, which users can configure their TTN/Helium setups to send data to using a HTTP or WebHooks integration.

Documentation on how to use these gateways is still in development, but there’s some initial information available on the sondehub-infra wiki here: https://github.com/projecthorus/sondehub-infra/wiki/Helium-&-TTN-(LoRaWAN)-Gateway

Recovery Report ActivityPub Bot

This bot reports recoveries on ActivityPub and can be subscribed to using Mastodon. Search for @sonderecovery@internaluse.net. It’s fun seeing all the recovery stories every day.

Cool community-developed projects using SondeHub data

We’re now seeing our APIs and data being used in other applications, providing useful tools and visualisations.

Jeremy Elson has developed some nice utilities and visualisations making use of the SondeHub radiosonde database. These include an email notifier system for radiosonde landings, and a heatmap of radiosonde landing locations.

Chris Remboldt has as a website ‘SondeFinder’ which allows searching for recent radiosonde landings in a user-defined area, and can also do some estimation of the landing site for sondes that weren’t tracked down to the ground.

If you have any other projects that you think we should feature on a future post, please let us know!