It's fun to see habhub in an article. ~10 years ago a group of friends and I launched 2 weather balloons for fun with a GPS logger, APRS transmitter, and a few sensors, and then retrieved it afterwards.
I have a bunch of memorable experiences from it, including:
1. Under inflating the first balloon because our helium provider was closed, and instead buying lower pressure "party" balloon containers (and not realizing until too late that lower pressure meant more helium left in the containers)
2. Chasing down the balloon at night and trying to explain why you wanted to walk onto some guys field to check for a weather balloon
3. Later calling a gas station to ask if "some guy just arrived with a weather balloon in their truck" when trying to track down the balloon
If anyone has kids and wants a fun project, I highly recommend it. There are a few companies online that sell kits, and it's neat to watch the different layers of the atmosphere (temperature and wind), and try to "chase" after the balloon and find it afterwards.
I had this idea before of sending ballons to "the space" with a collectible object and then retrieve them, saying "I have this specific object that was in space too". Is it possible or am I dreaming too much?
We did it in the US, and filed a NOTAM with the FAA. The hardest part was figuring out how to convert what I had (we are launching a weather balloon from X, Y coords at Z time) to what they wanted (distance, direction, etc from nearest air tower). It's just a phone number you call, and they were pretty friendly (helping convert my lat / lng to what they needed).
There are rules you have to understand and follow, notifications required but no approvals if you meet certain criteria. It's mostly an FAA thing in the US, so one jurisdiction.
Yup. We were able to find it both times. First time it "floated" and traveled further than we expected (at one point habhub predicted it to land in Africa). This is the one we called a gas station about, and we did end up getting it back. Second time was cleaner, and we drove up someone's driveway, and asked if we could retrieve it.
The part where he gets contacted over the hit-and-run reads like the curl guy’s experience with people investigating “hacking”.
I wonder how often this happens outside of software? Do fence manufacturers get emails asking to identify the culprit when someone crashes through a fence?
Fair, I guess, I just can’t imagine what it’s like getting all these weird requests and demands for a hobby project. Hopefully the author is more entertained than I would be.
Not a lawyer but as a citizen I generally understand that the courts expect demands from court parties to be met.
If meeting the court's (or court parties') demands costs you something you are generally entitled to charge them for it, within reason and with justification.
As a hobbyist therefore putting a service offering page together with your preferred rate probably helps establish the nature and parameters of any such service.
Bill rates / piece rates, especially, and setting up bounds of what is reasonable to expect, in proportion to your gig and your intended effort level.
Quantity and price tiers, turnaround times, what will be included in the deliverable, how it will be delivered, SLAs, etc.
Whatever defines your service, esp as it relates to the types of requests you end up getting.
If I start listing prices, I may need to ensure that I have a business entity set up for tax purposes and to guard against liability. Especially if I’m listing SLAs.
This is not a hobby, it’s a job.
This is why all my hobbies are dark web projects, these days.
I feel like it's a "cast a wide net" type of strategy. Doesn't really hurt to ask and there _could_ be the tiniest hint that could lead to something. Maybe?
Rings a bell, I think it was because Curl showed up as the user agent for malicious activity.
You have to be kind of lost to contact Daniel about it, but I think it's ok behaviour for junior sysadmins that are just starting out, everyone was starting out sometime, and curl is like a lightning catcher for the world's daily lucky thousand.
It's because curl is often embedded as a library or standalone executable with other software. So when a malicious or compromised piece of software is found, a less experienced investigator might see curl with its author tags in the file metadata, and follow it back to upstream.
In the UK a few decades ago, if you found a radiosonde from a weather balloon, it would have instructions on how to claim a recovery fee if you returned it for reuse. Sadly I never found one, but I knew this because my dad was a geophysicist and we lived at the time on a Scottish island which was one of the UK's launch spots. Looks like the recovery fee was stopped a long time ago, when the devices became cheap enough to be effectively disposable.
The author’s concern about keeping the infrastructure decentralized is pretty understandable, not just from a censorship/open-data perspective, but also from a security perspective: you don't want one server, or one person, to become an obvious target.
Slightly unrelated but I have no idea how wind speed predictions are made up high in the altitudes, is it just interpolation of data that are get from various radiosonoids across various timestamps and finding a regular or seasonal pattern?
Generally at altitude the wind goes from west to east. During the Cold War the US would launch spy balloons to overfly Russia whilst the wind was blowing against the Russians reciprocating. This is generally true in the current Ukraine war too.
As I understand it, it's a combination of things: aircraft reports, atmospheric motion vectors (e.g. a cloud doesn't have any propulsion, so if a cloud moves 30 km in an hour, you have learned something about the wind), Doppler wind lidar, and satellite measurements.
The numerical predictions of weather models often have many vertical components as well, so solving it for ground level also requires extending the forecast to the air, depending on the model.
To predict anything on the ground, you have to predict air temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction etc. for the entire troposphere. The output of the models in altitude are as relevant to the meteorologists as the output on the ground for manual expert analysis.
> Meanwhile (and you might have noticed me asking for AWS help on fedi) we contacted AWS as the source IP was from an AWS network. It was very important however to make sure the AWS support did not shutdown access.
I'm legitimately impressed that whoever got that ticket on AWS side actually followed through and was able to divert from their script...
I was one of the data points in that spike related to the Chinese balloon incident though that is not the first time I used sondehub. A couple years before that incident I found the site while trying to help someone understand what they were seeing in the sky near where they live.
An old dopehead, friend-of-a-friend was paranoid that they were being surveilled by aliens in UFOs, something they could assure you had been happening since the 1970's. Not coincidentally I'm sure, that's when they were a young dopehead. While outwardly funny to most of us, it was a serious issue for them. To help them understand all the shiny things in the sky at night I assembled a list of tools that could help them rule out various terrestrial sources for the shiny things. Stellaris or Celestia could help them identify stars and constellations, even showing them what the sky should look like at their exact location so they could compare in real time. They could also use their digital camera (after instructions on how to take low light photos that show stars) to take photos and later compare those photos to stars and planets that would've been visible when the photo was taken. I pointed them at Flightradar24 and FlightAware for air traffic and recommended they get a license instead of the free version so they could track more things better. They weren't close to an active military base but using either or both of those could help rule out military air traffic when the pilots were flying and broadcasting ADS-B.
Since many UFOs in the historical record were blamed on weather balloons I looked around for a way to find weather balloons visible in your area and that is when I found sondehub. The ability to see the balloon track was especially useful since I explained how objects at high altitudes could be visible even if they are hundreds of miles distant when you have a clear line of sight so the balloon doesn't need to be between them and the horizon. It only needed to be visible above the horizon and using the tools they could rule out quite a few things. Around the same time people were posting great photos of sprites associated with powerful thunderstorms well over the horizon so this helped them understand that shiny things in the sky are not necessarily close to them. I also used HeavensAbove to help them track known satellites and the ISS. Having them see the ISS cross the sky at their location a little after dark helped them understand why a bright light crossing the sky can quickly disappear once the concept of the earth's shadow was clear. It was nice and bright while sunlit and winked out as soon as it passed into shadow. I gave them links to astronomy sites so they could know when to expect meteor showers and other celestial phenomena.
All in all, they got a nice collection of tools, freely available, that they could use to understand why there were sparkly, shiny things in their sky. I haven't yet had confirmation that any of those sparkly, shiny things could not be explained using those tools.
You know. I came to that conclusion when they started shootings rockets at a civilian airplane in 2014, killing 298 civilians of which 196 people that I share citizenship with.
>Fuck. And Fuck Russia. (for time travellers and people in the future - in 2022 started a “special military operation” - aka a full scale invasion into Ukraine. The war continues at time of writing. Fuck Russia)
>In 2025 we received a request for data from the “Office of the Secretary of War (Intelligence and Security)” (US). Generally if there’s mutual community benefit we’ll find, process and release the data for free. However given this is was the Department of War and no expected community benefit we decided they should pay for the data. I was hesitant even working with them, as I don’t really want to help military, let alone the US - but since our data is public if we didn’t do it someone else probably would. So my reasoning shifted to, may as well extract some funds to pay for SondeHub infrastructure at the very least.
such a seamless transition from moral absolutism to moral relativism ;-)
What makes you think they are being absolutist when saying fuck Russia? You can disapprove of an unprovoked invasion from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism.
I don't really see them saying fuck the US, even though they've bombed girls schools in Iran.
Or saying fuck Israel because of their super well documented ongoing genocide.
"You can disapprove of ... from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism."
It's fun to see habhub in an article. ~10 years ago a group of friends and I launched 2 weather balloons for fun with a GPS logger, APRS transmitter, and a few sensors, and then retrieved it afterwards.
I have a bunch of memorable experiences from it, including:
1. Under inflating the first balloon because our helium provider was closed, and instead buying lower pressure "party" balloon containers (and not realizing until too late that lower pressure meant more helium left in the containers)
2. Chasing down the balloon at night and trying to explain why you wanted to walk onto some guys field to check for a weather balloon
3. Later calling a gas station to ask if "some guy just arrived with a weather balloon in their truck" when trying to track down the balloon
If anyone has kids and wants a fun project, I highly recommend it. There are a few companies online that sell kits, and it's neat to watch the different layers of the atmosphere (temperature and wind), and try to "chase" after the balloon and find it afterwards.
I had this idea before of sending ballons to "the space" with a collectible object and then retrieve them, saying "I have this specific object that was in space too". Is it possible or am I dreaming too much?
Can you “just do this” or is there some preapproval you’re meant to get beforehand? Presumably the answer varies wildly by jurisdiction.
We did it in the US, and filed a NOTAM with the FAA. The hardest part was figuring out how to convert what I had (we are launching a weather balloon from X, Y coords at Z time) to what they wanted (distance, direction, etc from nearest air tower). It's just a phone number you call, and they were pretty friendly (helping convert my lat / lng to what they needed).
There are rules you have to understand and follow, notifications required but no approvals if you meet certain criteria. It's mostly an FAA thing in the US, so one jurisdiction.
Were you able to find the balloon? Your last point has me wondering what happened. Did someone else get to it first?
Yup. We were able to find it both times. First time it "floated" and traveled further than we expected (at one point habhub predicted it to land in Africa). This is the one we called a gas station about, and we did end up getting it back. Second time was cleaner, and we drove up someone's driveway, and asked if we could retrieve it.
The part where he gets contacted over the hit-and-run reads like the curl guy’s experience with people investigating “hacking”.
I wonder how often this happens outside of software? Do fence manufacturers get emails asking to identify the culprit when someone crashes through a fence?
Actually, it wasn't unreasonable. If the guy caused the damage while picking up a sonde, to know who's sonde it was would help identify the culprit.
Or maybe the sonde continued transmitting and they have data on where the guy took it which would help ID him.
Fair, I guess, I just can’t imagine what it’s like getting all these weird requests and demands for a hobby project. Hopefully the author is more entertained than I would be.
Not a lawyer but as a citizen I generally understand that the courts expect demands from court parties to be met.
If meeting the court's (or court parties') demands costs you something you are generally entitled to charge them for it, within reason and with justification.
As a hobbyist therefore putting a service offering page together with your preferred rate probably helps establish the nature and parameters of any such service.
Bill rates / piece rates, especially, and setting up bounds of what is reasonable to expect, in proportion to your gig and your intended effort level.
Quantity and price tiers, turnaround times, what will be included in the deliverable, how it will be delivered, SLAs, etc.
Whatever defines your service, esp as it relates to the types of requests you end up getting.
If I start listing prices, I may need to ensure that I have a business entity set up for tax purposes and to guard against liability. Especially if I’m listing SLAs.
This is not a hobby, it’s a job.
This is why all my hobbies are dark web projects, these days.
I feel like it's a "cast a wide net" type of strategy. Doesn't really hurt to ask and there _could_ be the tiniest hint that could lead to something. Maybe?
In my first law class the prof said, "When it doubt, sue everybody."
Rings a bell, I think it was because Curl showed up as the user agent for malicious activity.
You have to be kind of lost to contact Daniel about it, but I think it's ok behaviour for junior sysadmins that are just starting out, everyone was starting out sometime, and curl is like a lightning catcher for the world's daily lucky thousand.
It's because curl is often embedded as a library or standalone executable with other software. So when a malicious or compromised piece of software is found, a less experienced investigator might see curl with its author tags in the file metadata, and follow it back to upstream.
In the UK a few decades ago, if you found a radiosonde from a weather balloon, it would have instructions on how to claim a recovery fee if you returned it for reuse. Sadly I never found one, but I knew this because my dad was a geophysicist and we lived at the time on a Scottish island which was one of the UK's launch spots. Looks like the recovery fee was stopped a long time ago, when the devices became cheap enough to be effectively disposable.
The author’s concern about keeping the infrastructure decentralized is pretty understandable, not just from a censorship/open-data perspective, but also from a security perspective: you don't want one server, or one person, to become an obvious target.
This really escalated amusingly. Some things just write themselves.
Slightly unrelated but I have no idea how wind speed predictions are made up high in the altitudes, is it just interpolation of data that are get from various radiosonoids across various timestamps and finding a regular or seasonal pattern?
Generally at altitude the wind goes from west to east. During the Cold War the US would launch spy balloons to overfly Russia whilst the wind was blowing against the Russians reciprocating. This is generally true in the current Ukraine war too.
Some interesting links:
https://www.hisutton.com/US-Navy-CIA-Submarine-Launched-Spy-...
https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-Navy-High-Altitude-Spy-Ball...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iD6XaaO9bEo
As I understand it, it's a combination of things: aircraft reports, atmospheric motion vectors (e.g. a cloud doesn't have any propulsion, so if a cloud moves 30 km in an hour, you have learned something about the wind), Doppler wind lidar, and satellite measurements.
The numerical predictions of weather models often have many vertical components as well, so solving it for ground level also requires extending the forecast to the air, depending on the model.
To predict anything on the ground, you have to predict air temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction etc. for the entire troposphere. The output of the models in altitude are as relevant to the meteorologists as the output on the ground for manual expert analysis.
> Meanwhile (and you might have noticed me asking for AWS help on fedi) we contacted AWS as the source IP was from an AWS network. It was very important however to make sure the AWS support did not shutdown access.
I'm legitimately impressed that whoever got that ticket on AWS side actually followed through and was able to divert from their script...
Ditto. My experience with AWS support has been generally disappointing.
> Meteolabor AG
> climate hoax
Once again, the Swiss are confirming their image as the most US-like country in Europe :'(
I was one of the data points in that spike related to the Chinese balloon incident though that is not the first time I used sondehub. A couple years before that incident I found the site while trying to help someone understand what they were seeing in the sky near where they live.
An old dopehead, friend-of-a-friend was paranoid that they were being surveilled by aliens in UFOs, something they could assure you had been happening since the 1970's. Not coincidentally I'm sure, that's when they were a young dopehead. While outwardly funny to most of us, it was a serious issue for them. To help them understand all the shiny things in the sky at night I assembled a list of tools that could help them rule out various terrestrial sources for the shiny things. Stellaris or Celestia could help them identify stars and constellations, even showing them what the sky should look like at their exact location so they could compare in real time. They could also use their digital camera (after instructions on how to take low light photos that show stars) to take photos and later compare those photos to stars and planets that would've been visible when the photo was taken. I pointed them at Flightradar24 and FlightAware for air traffic and recommended they get a license instead of the free version so they could track more things better. They weren't close to an active military base but using either or both of those could help rule out military air traffic when the pilots were flying and broadcasting ADS-B.
Since many UFOs in the historical record were blamed on weather balloons I looked around for a way to find weather balloons visible in your area and that is when I found sondehub. The ability to see the balloon track was especially useful since I explained how objects at high altitudes could be visible even if they are hundreds of miles distant when you have a clear line of sight so the balloon doesn't need to be between them and the horizon. It only needed to be visible above the horizon and using the tools they could rule out quite a few things. Around the same time people were posting great photos of sprites associated with powerful thunderstorms well over the horizon so this helped them understand that shiny things in the sky are not necessarily close to them. I also used HeavensAbove to help them track known satellites and the ISS. Having them see the ISS cross the sky at their location a little after dark helped them understand why a bright light crossing the sky can quickly disappear once the concept of the earth's shadow was clear. It was nice and bright while sunlit and winked out as soon as it passed into shadow. I gave them links to astronomy sites so they could know when to expect meteor showers and other celestial phenomena.
All in all, they got a nice collection of tools, freely available, that they could use to understand why there were sparkly, shiny things in their sky. I haven't yet had confirmation that any of those sparkly, shiny things could not be explained using those tools.
Thanks for this link.
> Fuck Russia
You know. I came to that conclusion when they started shootings rockets at a civilian airplane in 2014, killing 298 civilians of which 196 people that I share citizenship with.
And fuck Germany for still buying Russian gas.
Dude , were you actually able to find the balloon though ?
Interacting with the public is the most exciting yet frightening aspect of any public project.
There are always flashes of brilliance but it's hard to see them when wading through the vitriol.
Geopolitical warfare can be triggered by much less than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_My_Name_with_an_S
This is fiction...
>Fuck. And Fuck Russia. (for time travellers and people in the future - in 2022 started a “special military operation” - aka a full scale invasion into Ukraine. The war continues at time of writing. Fuck Russia)
>In 2025 we received a request for data from the “Office of the Secretary of War (Intelligence and Security)” (US). Generally if there’s mutual community benefit we’ll find, process and release the data for free. However given this is was the Department of War and no expected community benefit we decided they should pay for the data. I was hesitant even working with them, as I don’t really want to help military, let alone the US - but since our data is public if we didn’t do it someone else probably would. So my reasoning shifted to, may as well extract some funds to pay for SondeHub infrastructure at the very least.
such a seamless transition from moral absolutism to moral relativism ;-)
What makes you think they are being absolutist when saying fuck Russia? You can disapprove of an unprovoked invasion from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism.
I don't really see them saying fuck the US, even though they've bombed girls schools in Iran. Or saying fuck Israel because of their super well documented ongoing genocide.
"You can disapprove of ... from many, many ethical perspectives without going near absolutism."