Radiosonde tracking

10.01.2024
I have build my own sondehub tracker searching receiver.
I actually build two different SW solutions, se below.

SondeHub

On sondehub.org you can find instructions on how to build a receiver to track radiosondes.
The SW is named “radiosonde_auto_rx”. You can find docs and videos for this in the right pane of the home page screen.
The SW installation for sondehub is described very detailed here, but I had lots of dead ends, but finally got it to work.

Radiosondy

There is another site which serves a similar service for radiosondes.
This is made by SQ6KXY and his site is radiosondy.info. Under Userpanel you can make an account and then you can request a special made SW for you named “kxyTrack”.

So far I only found one radiosonde.

Hardware

I had a RaspberryPi model 1 B and a cheap TV dongle in stock and was eager to get this to do something for me.

Here my hardware:

There is a 12 V to 5 V step down switch-mode regulator so I feed it with 12 V from a normal wall supply.
I have made the SW for both radiosondy and kxytrack and have it on its own SD card (8 GB), but of course I can only run one at a time.

The antenna is a home made dual frequency dipol (144 MHz and 433 MHz) from Funkamateur, about 10 m high.

Tracking

See here how it looked tracking a sonde with radiosonde_auto_rx:

Too far away from me so no hunt today.
I was able to read the sonde until it was about 4-500 m above ground. It was OZ2OE who got the last sample (see the green line).

2024-02-26, Mobile phone screenshot, My station had the last sample.

Hopefully there will be sondes closer to me in the future 🙂

Min private hjemmeside