Strap in, this story involves a cheese fortune teller, the department of war, and nearly every other government department in between.
In 2017 (I think?) I was introduced to weather balloon hunting by Mark VK5QI. At the time the Australian balloon chasing community was small. Only Melbourne and Adelaide radiosondes (the transmitter on weather balloons) were being tracked on a website called Habhub - high altitude ballooning hub. This site was designed for amateur balloons and not meteorological weather balloons.
Over time more and more radiosondes were tracked on Habhub and eventually Habhub admins introduced a default filter that removed weather balloons by default. A query parameter could be added to the URL to remove the filter and on 12th of May 2018 sondehub.org registered with a single purpose - a URL redirect to Habhub with a radiosonde specific filter. To be clear - this was more of a joke than a decision to run a radiosonde tracking service. You’d go to sondehub.org and it would redirect you to habhub.org. That was it.
However Habhub was never designed for so many unique balloons each day. By July we decided to start proxying radiosonde ingestion data through SondeHub. This allowed us to capture more data as well (no longer rate limiting our selves). This went to a seperate OpenSearch cluster, however at this stage we didn’t use or expose this data. I was using this more as a toy - to play around with different Amazon Web Services (AWS) services and analytics platforms.
By 2019 the Habhub servers were really struggling - aprs.fi as well. We realised that we needed to run our own service and our initial plan was that we would build new APIs, and eventually new frontend. We then started getting information requests from government agencies regarding radiosonde data. For example we received a request regarding an insurance claim about a radiosondes hitting a horse, causing it to bolt through a fence. One of the reasons for this is because unlike official software at the time, our system tracked the radiosondes all the way to the ground.
Also in 2019 we detected a drop in radiosonde launches. This lined up with the GPS rollover date - we thought our software was broken however it turned out to be issues with Vaisala’s equipment which prevented launches from occuring. Funnily enough our software handled the rollover ok…