sondehub

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

Added 2023-04-16 09:47:51 +0000 UTC

Thanks for Mark (VK5QI) for writing todays patreon post!

ARDC Grant

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/

Even with this grant, Patreon pledges are still vital to ensuring that SondeHub has funding for ongoing operation, and we are ever thankful to all of you that continue to show your support!

Sondehub-Amateur Time Period Updates

Up until now, the SondeHub-Amateur tracker has only allowed viewing of up to 3 days of historical data (though older data has been available via our Grafana dashboards).

Recently we added support for up to 7 days of history for unfiltered queries, and up to 1 year history for filtered queries.

This is most useful for tracking pico-balloons that have been in the air for a long time, for example to track the path of the W5KUB-113 flight over the last year, enter ‘W5KUB-113’ in the search box at the top-left of the tracker, press enter, and then you will be able to select the longer time periods from the drop-down box at the top-left of the map:

Unfortunately we have run up against some limitations of the mapping library we are using (Leaflet), in how it handles tracks that cross over +/- 180 degrees Longitude, resulting in tracks being ‘cut’ at this longitude. We have a few ideas on how to fix this, all fairly complicated, but hopefully we will get this resolved eventually.

SondeHub-Amateur APRS-IS Gateway Upgrades

Since SondeHub-Amateur began, we have run an APRS-IS gateway to import positions from amateur balloons that report into the APRS-IS network. This captures all flights which transmit APRS telemetry, and also WSPR flights which have their data submitted to APRS-IS via various gateways.

There are many different approaches to sending telemetry information via APRS packets. While APRS does have a specification for telemetry packets, this seems to be rarely used in high-altitude balloon payloads, with developers preferring to put telemetry data into the APRS comment field, in various formats.

Recently, Mark VK5QI has added support for the comment-field telemetry format for a few of the more popular high-altitude balloon APRS trackers models, and are working on adding support for more.

The currently supported models include the:

High Altitude Science StratoTrack
LightAPRS
WB8ELK SkyTracker

This means that telemetry data from these tracker models will now be shown on amateur.sondehub.org, and be available for plotting on our Grafana instance (easily accessible via the ‘Plots’ button on the tracker).