9. Containerized AIS Decoding with RTL-SDR Dongle

   It's been about 6 months since I started receiving AIS signals using a RTL-SDR Blog v3 dongle. My station is decoding between 35 and 70 ships at any given time, depending on time of day and how many ships there are in San Francisco Bay.

   The RTL-SDR Blog v3 dongle is a really inexpensive software-defined receiver. The "official" version costs about $25, and knockoff versions can be had for $10 or less. However, there's a reason why knockoff versions are less than half price, they use very cheap components and drift like crazy. I have many friends who bought the cheap version only to find that they just don't work, then purchased another knockoff that also didn't work. So save ...

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10. Two Radiosonde Recoveries in San Francisco

    The prevailing winds here in California blow from west to east, from the Pacific Ocean towards the Sierra Nevada mountains. Radiosondes launched from Oakland International Airport float in these winds, landing east of Oakland in the Central Valley, or south in the hills east of San Jose. I never recover the ones that land in the Central Valley, as driving 2 hours each direction during rush hour to recover a balloon is a bit too far for me. Only rarely do they land in populated areas in the Bay Area, and almost never on the Peninsula or in the city of San Francisco.

    This map (code below) shows the landing locations of all the radiosondes launched from Oakland since November ...

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11. Telemetry from an Oakland Radiosonde Floater

    In the beginning of March, something happened to the regular cadence of radiosonde launches from Oakland Airport. No balloon was launched on March 11th 2300 UTC, nor the next standard launch window on March 12th 1100 UTC (5am Pacific time). The SDM Ops Status Messages had a 10142 error for Oakland, which is ground equipment failure. I'm guessing that something broke or got jammed on their autolauncher, or maybe they ran out of hydrogen gas.

    By the afternoon of March 12th, the issue appeared to be resolved, and there was three launches in quick succession. The first and third balloons, S3231708 and S2321334, were normal, but the middle balloon slowly rose and leveled out around 35,000 meters (~115,000 ...

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12. An Atmospheric River of Radiosondes

    I recently installed a new antenna (see below), and checking SondeHub a few hours later I noticed a bunch of balloons west of Sacramento. Well, that's pretty interesting. There aren't any regular launches near Sacramento, so this must be something special. They seemed to be launched frequently, because when I stopped receiving one balloon I immediately start receiving the next.

    

    These balloons were far away! I guess this new antenna works a lot better than the old one. Trying to back out the launch location, it seemed like they were being launched from Beale AFB, which is directly east of Yuba City. Maybe a military project? The military does launch a lot of radiosondes, but those are usually in Arizona ...

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13. AIS Decoding with an RTL-SDR Blog v3 Dongle

    Update July 2021: Run rtl-ais and kplex in a docker container.

    At the conclusion of my last AIS blog post, I noted that the AIS receiving station I had set up was not sustainable for the long term. It was using a full hardware radio, and the software was running in a Windows 7 virtual machine on my personal laptop. Since AIS decoding is not super useful only when my laptop is powered on, a new station setup was needed.

    One option would be buying a dedicated Raspberry Pi with a dAISy Hat receiver. It's a dual-channel receiver that spits out UART serial NMEA frames to the Raspberry Pi, and costs $70, plus a Pi for $35. But that's a ...

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14. Listening to Fox-1Cliff (AO-95)

    I recently moved, and while packing up boxes I found my FunCube Pro+ receiver dongle. One of the many Pandemic Positives is that I have a lot of free time on my hands now, so I thought I would see if I could receive amateur satellites with this. Perusing the AMSAT live Oscar satellite status page, the only recently-launched CubeSat I could receive with the FunCube Pro+ dongle is AO-95, also known as Fox-1Cliff. And even then, the satellite appeared to be in Safe mode, with its transponder not working due to a failed receiver.

    Fox-1Cliff is named for Cliff Buttschardt K7RR, who was the amateur radio mentor for the PolySat project at Cal Poly. He was also heavily involved ...

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15. Two Months of Radiosonde Balloon Reception

    It's been two months since my first radiosonde recovery. In this post, I perform some analysis of the receiving stations at my apartment in San Francisco and my vacation home/parents place in Los Gatos. I also include the python code needed to generate your own plots.

    San Francisco Station

    Immediately after I got home from my first recovery, I converted my regular amateur radio station at my apartment to receive radiosondes. The external antenna is a Diamond X-50NA, which is a great amateur radio 5/8 wave 2m/70cm dual-band antenna. Coax up to the roof is about 80 ft of LMR-400, which is calculated at around 1.5 dB loss at 145 MHz and 2.5 dB at ...

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16. Two Radiosonde Payload Recoveries, and RS-41SGP Teardown

    I've been watching SondeHub for the past two months to, every day since my first recovery, but the winds have not been cooperating! Lots of radiosondes went into the hills east of San Jose, out into the ocean, into the Santa Cruz mountains, all the way down to Gilroy, or splashed down in the bay, but none have landed in populated areas within an hours drive of my home in San Francisco. I realized how lucky I was that the first radiosonde I successfully tracked actually landed in a populated place.

    In a typical city, approximately 35-50% of the land is dedicated to cars: residential roads, arterials, freeways, and parking lots. So when a balloon lands in populated areas of ...

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17. Oakland Radiosonde Investigation, Launch, and Recovery

    I've recently stumbled upon the radiosonde_auto_rx project. I've always been interested in tracking radiosondes, and even watched a radiosonde launch in Inuvik, NWT a few years back. Worldwide, there are over 800 launches every twelve hours of every day, and this data feeds into weather forecast models.

    The radiosonde_auto_rx project is built around decoding many different types of radiosondes with a software-defined receiver. The preferred receiver is a RTL-SDR Blog v3, and I already had an extra one of those (because they are so inexpensive!).

    Most radiosondes worldwide use 400-406 MHz as their downlink, but the United States also uses some frequencies around 1680 MHz. Reading the documentation on which frequencies are in use, it appeared ...

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