Since I've had the auto radiosonde running for the last few months I thought I'd do another update. For the most part there is nothing but good to report, with a little bit of not so good as well as a little bit of ugly.
This is just a short little update to my post about tracking weather balloons. Last night I had an email from auto_rx about discovering a new balloon. No big deal nothing unusual here, I normally get anywhere from 3-5 of these a day between the 0Z and 12Z launches. When I looked at the details though, something caught my interest. The distance to this particular sonde was 467 km or 290 miles away! This surprises me seeing as my antenna is only about 9 feet or so off the ground. I'm planning an upgrade of sorts to this setup in the not to distant future. I'm hoping to set up a 10m mast and I plan to stick it at the top. Getting higher up in the air should let me detect the sondes when they're a little closer to the ground.
Weather balloons and radiosondes are something that I've worked with early on in my electronics career. So when a co-worker told me about Sondehub, I was interested. Sondehub is like flight aware for weather balloons. It uses a SDR to receive a signal, in this case the weather balloons telemetry data, which is then sent over the internet to Sondehub where you can view the data on a map. Typically the National Weather Service stops tracking the balloon once it has popped and begins it's journey back to the ground. Using the SDR however, you can track the balloon until it reaches the ground. From there it's even possible to attempt to recover the radiosonde.
