Twice a day, every day, radiosondes are launched all around the world. These are tiny high altitude balloons with electronic sensor packages and radio transmitters attached. NEWBS dedicates itself to finding and recovering as many of these radiosondes as possible.

How? Radiosondes transmit their GPS coordinates over the radio once per second. Using a 70cm antenna and a properly set up Raspberry Pi, we receive these signals, decode them, and upload the data to an online database, called Sondehub. If anyone wants to see the reported positions of these sondes, they can check the live map on https://sondehub.org/. 

If you would like to set up your own station, VK5CBM has created a very easy to follow set of instructions, as well as a Raspberry Pi image to get you started. Just make sure to get a 70cm antenna and connect it to your RTL-SDR.

And if you find a radiosonde and don’t want to keep it for yourself, let us know! We plan to use them as balloon trackers for our own flights.

Note: The tutorial above does not cover making your station MOBILE, so you can bring it in the car with you. Important if you want to find a radiosonde’s final resting location! To extend your station with this capability, you’ll want to follow the instructions below.

• If you would like to take your tracking station back and forth between your home and car, first, it will need to be able to change WiFi networks. To automatically make the pi switch WiFi networks, while setting up the wpa_supplicant file, just copy/paste the network section and add your phone’s hotspot into the WiFi details. It should look something like this:

country=us

update_config=1

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={

 scan_ssid=1

 ssid=”MyNetworkSSID”

 psk=”Pa55w0rd1234″

}

network={

 scan_ssid=1

 ssid=”MyCarWifi”

 psk=”Pa55w0rdF0rCaR”

}

• You’ll need to SSH into the Pi.
• In Command Prompt, type in ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
• The password is autorx
• When in your car, we also recommend installing Chasemapper. Chasemapper will give you a faster interface that updates much more quickly when finding your sonde on the map. To set up Chasemapper, follow these instructions.
• You don’t need to change the telemetry source.
• One text editor you can use for configuration is sudo nano.