K6RPT-11 APRS balloon from California in Europe - igates needed for 144.390!

Updated 2011-12-14: Still flying, igates needed further west!

An APRS-equipped high-altitude balloon, using the callsign K6RPT-11 (track on aprs.fi), launched from San Jose, California, has almost crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and is now passing Azores, and approaching North Africa. With a little change in direction it could as well go to Spain or Portugal! It was already a great success when it managed to travel to the east coast of the US.

There is a catch - it's transmitting on the US frequency of 144.390 MHz instead of the usual European frequency of 144.800 MHz. That's will help reception, since 144.390 is very quiet around here, but we need some igates in Morocco, Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and so on, to temporarily switch frequencies - and do it now! Keep an eye on the track - it could be coming your way!

Please help spread the word, right now, tonight, amongst igate operators around that area.

There might be a very fun recovery operation ahead for some hams down there.

Stephen H. Smith wrote:
"The K6RPT-1 APRS-equipped high-altitude balloon left the U.S. mainland,  headed out over the Atlantic about 0330 UTC Tuesday after a coast-to-coast crossing of the US from the San Jose, California launch site.

Radio contact was lost about 400 miles off the New Jersey coast. At that point it was still transmitting and reporting normal battery voltage, holding altitude around 107,000 ft, and headed toward the Straights of Gibraltar at about 150 MPH (240 KM/h)."

"It's now around sunset at it's current location, so it looks as though the balloon's envelope survived the day's UV exposure -- better and better chance now it WILL make landfall over there. ."

Links:

http://twitter.com/k6rpt (Balloon project's twitter feed)
http://www.californianearspaceproject.com/

New map viewers record

Yesterday afternoon aprs.fi made a new record: there were well over 3000 users viewing the real-time map at the same time. Almost all of them were displaying the embedded map on the Copenhagen Suborbitals Launch Campaign June 2011 page. The guys built a rocket, capable of taking 1 man to the edge of the space, and did their first successful test flight yesterday. Awesome.



The launch campaing page's embedded APRS map shows the position of the Sputnik launch platform. The platform hosts a custom APRS tracker designed and built by OZ1EKD and OZ7HVO.

I was happy to see that aprs.fi did well with the larger amount of visitors. They were all looking at the same station, and the caching worked well - the database really didn't get any additional queries due to the amount of viewers. I was able to find some spots where additional optimization would be useful and could take down the CPU usage of the web service considerably. Here are some graphs from one of the two servers:

Silja Europa steering & comments

Silja Europa (live position), a rather large passenger ferry (photos), has some steering issues, and is currently doing circles near Åland. News in Finnish: hs.fi, iltasanomat.fi. There are 1659 people onboard, but there is no immediate danger, since the ship can still steer using the propellers, although in a rather coarse manner.

Another small bit of news is that I've disabled anonymous commenting on this blog due to comment spam - I'm getting tired of manually deleting all the spam. From now on, you'll need a Google account to comment, or an account on one of the supported OpenID-enabled services. Sorry for the trouble.

During the last couple weeks I've been working on making the service UTF-8 clean for proper universal text messaging. It almost works in my testing installation, but there are still some quirks I need to clean up.

I've also installed a new database replica server at another physical site in downtown Helsinki, so that I'm able to bring the service alive without significant data loss in case of a complete hosting site loss (fire, flooding, extended network outage). The main servers are located in Espoo, Finland.

Arctic Sea position speculation

Quick recap: A cargo vessel called Arctic Sea (MMSI 215860000) was probably hijacked on July 24th 2009 near the eastern coast of Sweden. This was big news in northern Europe, since hijackings generally happen near the Somali coast, not over here. The ship has a Russian crew of 15, it appears to be owned by a Finnish company, and the owners of that company are of Russian origin. The Finnish media had considerable trouble trying to figure out the true owners, and the owners were really hard to interview. The ship deported from the harbor of Pietarsaari on 22nd of July and carries 6500 tons of Finnish timber, worth of about 1.3 MEUR.

The really odd thing is that the ship didn't go to the nearest Swedish port, but continued towards Africa as if nothing had happened. Very strange indeed. Either the hijackers were still on the ship, or the crew is taking part in the plot.

Latest news (Ransom demanded): BBC, CNN, YLE.

There have been a few questions about AIS positions of Arctic Sea shown on aprs.fi.

Q: Why is the track not shown for the moment of hijacking between Gotland and mainland Sweden?

A: There are no AIS receivers in the area which would directly send AIS reports to aprs.fi. These receivers are run by volunteers (thank you!), and each volunteer chooses where to submit AIS data. There is a receiver in the area, but it is submitting data to MarineTraffic only, and while MarineTraffic and aprs.fi exchange AIS data, aprs.fi is not getting the reports of all of those receivers. The Swedish maritime officials have an AIS receiver network of their own, and they've reported it ran circles and stopped for a while.

Q: Is the position shown for Saturday, 15th of August, valid?

A: Technically, it's possible, but I personally would find it very unlikely. It is easy to fake and it doesn't make any sense for the hijackers to publish their true position like this.

The position report was sent by an anonymous receiver station to MarineTraffic. It is quite easy to send fake data to MarineTraffic over the Internet, since they allow unauthenticated UDP packets containing NMEA strings to be sent to the service. aprs.fi does not allow unauthenticated UDP packets, all AIS submissions are tied to a specific receiving station using a password. Of course any one of those stations could feed us invalid positions, but at least we have some idea of the originator.

If the hijackers (or someone else) wanted to play tricks, they could also go to a shop selling marine radio equipment, buy an AIS transmitter, configure Arctic Sea's MMSI number (and other correct data) in it, give it an incorrect position by crafted NMEA strings (fake GPS receiver on the serial port of the AIS transmitter) and have it transmit the packets on the correct AIS frequency. If they've got the money and motivation to hijack ships with guns and speedboats, they've certainly got the guts to buy or steal AIS equipment. They could also grab the AIS transmitter from Arctic Sea, and take it to another position using a speedboat.

The French navy says there were 3 military vessels in the claimed position on the Bay of Biscay, heading for the Baltic sea, and they didn't see the hijacked ship. And they didn't see it on their radar, either.

The coast guard of Kap Verde claims to have seen the vessel about 800 km off the coast of Cape Verde, which is some 3600 km away from the Bay of Biscay.

In any case, this is starting to become a good plot for a movie.

New simultaneous viewers record and related slowness

Seems like we hit a new high of over 1000 simultaneous map viewers today, mostly thanks to Dayton Hamfest, and a popular live Hamfest video feed with an embedded map. They're giving away freebies.

A couple of components started hitting file descriptor limits, which had last been upgraded over a year ago. Too many simultaneous connections per process. This made the site perform very, very slowly. I quadrupled the limits, and the site started to perform quickly again, I hope that's enough for more than a year to come. Well, I have to admit that it would actually be a nice surprise if the site would be so popular that it wouldn't be enough...

I also fixed a bug in the "first heard" algorithm pointed out by Ian, VK1IAN. The digipeater alias GATE was not treated as a special digipeater alias (like WIDE, RELAY and TRACE are), and an igate which first heard a packet with a GATE in the digi path was not given credit for hearing it first.

Another fix that went in was a filter which takes out complete APRS packets which have somehow made their way to the comment field of another APRS packet. Apparently something is loosing CR LF sequences between packets (could be my code...), which causes packets to go into the comment of the previous one. Before I find the actual bug I've added a filter to strip these off.

Dayton Hamvention APRS view

Dayton Hamvention is here again on next weekend. I've set up a separate page showing live APRS activity at Hamvention.

Bob Bruninga is expecting to have APRStt running there, too, so if you're visiting Hamvention, you might be able to place yourself on the map using just a DTMF-capable 2m transceiver.

I've also added a new parameter 'he_maptype' in the APRS map embedding interface which allows you to select satellite, physical or hybrid map views in addition to the normal street map.

Balloon flight right now: OH6SIX, Pula-Ilmari IV

It's the last day of the summer camp of the Finnish Amateur Radio League (SRAL), and the guys there just launched a balloon with an Opentracker 2 and a cross-band FM repeater (145.4 MHz in, 433.4 MHz out). It's now at 5087 meters, going up. There's also a CW/HELL beacon at 28.322 MHz. Track OH6SIX!

Kawasaki ZZR1200 with an OpenTracker

Here's my Kawasaki ZZR1200 motorcycle, equipped with an OpenTracker 1+ and a Puxing PX-777 handheld radio. I installed the APRS tracker in May 2008. It's callsign is OH7LZB-10. Click on the photos to get a larger view.

The radio and the tracker fit nicely inside the box under the seat. It's generally a dry place, but might be slightly humid. Maybe some additional weather sealing would be in place. Maybe I'll put the whole lot in a sealed plastic bag, or fill the tracker with hot melt glue.

The APRS tracking setup gets it's power through a Powerpole connector and a 1A fuse from the tail lights wiring, which is powered whenever the lights are on (they're turned on automatically when the engine is running). There is an accessory power connector under the seat, but it goes directly to the battery, so it's always powered.

The PX-777 wants roughly 8 volts of DC, so I glued a 7808 regulator with a small heat sink to the back of the radio. I feed the same 8V to the OT1+ tracker, which has an internal 5V regulator, which also powers the GPS unit.

I built a custom antenna mounting bracket out of aluminum profile, a female BNC chassis connector, a bit of RG58 and a crimped SMA connector for the Puxing. The bracket is attached to the metal tubing of the Kappa/Giwi 3-bag mounting structure. All RF connections are sealed with heat-shrinking tube. The antenna is a Nagoya NA-771 BNC 2m/70cm whip. The antenna position is not an optimal one - but it's practical, and didn't require any modifications to the bike itself. And it doesn't affect the looks too much. I'm planning to try out a regular 1/4th wave vertical, which will require proper grounding of the bag mount.

The answers to the FAQs are: 1164cc, top speed around 270 km/h (167 mph). No, I haven't tried it. This is my third bike, the previous ones were Kawasaki ER-5 and Suzuki GSX750F.

Trackers in airplanes

Only a moment's consideration will reveal the amazing possibilities for our aviation community.

Sam (KJ4CKK) has installed a Byonics MicroTrak-300 in his self-built RV6 kit aircraft (which took him 995.25 hours to build) and prepared a very nice guide for non-ham aviators about getting a license and installing an APRS tracker in a plane. Tracking airplanes is becoming more and more popular.

His plane's tactical callsign (as assigned by the FAA) is N399SB. Currently the last received position seems to have a lat/lng of (nearly but not exactly) 0/0 , probably a bad GPS fix, but just pick another day from the date menu on the right to see some of his flight tracks. They look even better on Google Earth.

Some more planes: N789PH (RV-9A) OH-XKR (Kitfox 4) OH-XST (experimental) N821RP (Long-EZ)

vansairforce.com has a discussion forum dedicated to APRS tracking of airplanes.

Lost: Find 815: Christiane I on APRS

ABC studios, an Australian company called Hoodlum and the creators of the TV series Lost have created an alternative reality game called Find 815, which produces content for fans of Lost during January. The first episode of Season 4 will be aired on January 31st. Lost is pretty popular, and so is the Find 815 game. The game is described in more detail on Lostpedia, a wiki site dedicated to Lost.

The story briefly mentions amateur radio, and involves a ship called Christiane I. The fun part is that Christiane I has an APRS tracker onboard and is now sailing somewhere near the Christmas Island! There has been some speculation whether ABC has actually hired a real ship, which could be tracked using APRS, and a few popular blogs and forums have linked to findu and aprs.fi.

I cannot comment on whether the ship tracker is authentic, although the TCPXX path does mean something to APRS experts.

Ships in Åbo and the ARBONET-II balloon launch

Thanks to www.aboais.net, we now have an AIS feed from Turku, showing the busy traffic of the Archipelago of Finland (Saaristomeri). Thank you, Petri!

Mark, N4CMB reports that the ARBONET team is launching a high-altitude balloon called ARBONET-II from JD Trissell Airport in Clarksville, Texas at 14:30 UTC (9:30 AM CDT) on Saturday, October 20th. The balloon will carry an APRS tracker operating on 144.390 as K5FRC-11 (aprs.he.fi tracking), a 70 cm up / 2 meter down cross band FM repeater, a 10 meter CW beacon and a plain language homing beacon that will transmit navigation data in plain English on the 2 meter band. There are cameras and environmental sensors too, so there should be some fine coverage of the event afterwards!

APRS in a rally car

Kris (KI6IUC) reports that they'll have APRS tracking in their rally car while driving the Prescott Rally in Prescott, AZ, USA on Friday and Saturday this weekend. Cool!

Dew points and more AIS

This morning I added dew point calculation to the weather pages and temperature graphs. It was really easy. I used the Magnus approximation referenced by the Wikipedia article.

Thanks to Kai Gunter, LA3QMA, we now have AIS data from Bergen, Norway. Most excellent! If you're running ShipPlotter somewhere and would like to share your data with us, please drop me an email (the address is in my Blogger profile).

Now I'll head towards downtown, to hear Dream Theater play live in Helsinki! Tomi OH2BNS, the author of gMFSK, is coming too.

APRS balloon flights this weekend

Mark, N4CMB reports in a blog comment that members of the North Texas Balloon Project are launching flight 15 on Saturday, September 1, 2007 at about 13:30 UTC (8:30 am CDT) from the Hillsboro Municipal Airport (32.0835N 97.0971W). The balloon's APRS tracker callsign is W5SJZ-11. It will carry beacons and a crossband FM repeater. Thanks for the note, Mark!

Ilmari-2007b will fly on Sunday, September 2, 2007 at about 06:00 UTC (09:00 EET+DST) from Sappee, KP21GJ. It's APRS tracker callsign is OH2SIX-11. In addition to the beacons Ilmari carries a crossband linear transponder (much like a satellite: it receives on 144 MHz and transmits on 437 MHz) and an 1282 MHz FM-ATV video transmitter.

Update (Monday 3rd of September): Ilmari 2007b was postponed due to bad weather, but NTBP flight 15 did fly on saturday.

Happy tracking, everyone!

AIS vessel tracking in Australia

Thanks to Ian, VK2HIM we now have AIS tracking data from the coast south of Sydney, Australia!

10 MHz HF APRS in Namibia

Mike OE3MZC, who happens to be the president of the Austrian Amateur Radio Society, is staying in Namibia as V51/OE3MZC, and driving around in a 4-wheel-drive car featuring a 10 MHz HF APRS tracker. His position reports are received by igates in South Africa (1500 km away) and Australia (11000 km, or 7000 miles away)!

• OE3MZC-15 on the map
• Mike's path on 2007-07-18 (nice scenery!)
  
• Information and statistics on Mike's APRS traffic

I suddenly feel like setting up an 10 MHz igate somewhere.

(found this on the South African Radio League web forum.)

Gliders in Sweden

APRS trackers have been installed in a bunch of gliders (or sailplanes) in Sweden. They seem to fly around Eskilstuna, and belong to Eskilstuna Flygklubb. Their APRS callsigns follow the callsigns of the airplanes, with the "-" removed (APRS callsign SEUUU belongs to the SE-UUU aircraft). I wonder what frequency they're using, and if they're doing this with an amateur license... but it's very cool indeed.

• SE-TXD is an LS-4a
• SE-USB is an ASW 27b
• SE-ULP is a Duo Discus

And the list goes on...

I'm sure a good busy flying day looks very cool on Google Earth.

AIS ship tracking

AIS, or Automatic Identification System is not much unlike APRS - it is a professional tracking system for ships. It runs at 9600 bit/s (GMSK) on two marine VHF frequencies, with a nice binary protocol which features automatic synchronization and time multiplexing - even with a very high number of vessels transmitting position reports once every 2 to 10 seconds, packet collisions will not be a problem. The protocol is standardized and well-defined, but unfortunately patented.

Fortunately the protocol is unencrypted and available. There is a Windows application called ShipPlotter which can decode AIS traffic and export the received position reports using HTTP. If you live somewhere near a coast, set up a 160 MHz FM receiver with a discriminator output or data port (you can't properly decode 9600 bit/s from the audio output of most FM receivers), plug it in the sound card of your PC, and you can track ships from miles away. A single receiver on the south coast of Finland can hear ships from Tallinn and a good part of the Gulf of Finland.

Now, aprs.he.fi can receive the HTTP position report exports sent by ShipPlotter. If you run it somewhere on a 24/7 basis, please get in touch with me and share the view with others! There's currently one receiver feeding us with AIS traffic from Helsinki, Gulf of Finland (thanks Tapio!).

To see some AIS traffic, zoom to the area between Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia and make sure you have enabled viewing AIS data in the Options!

High-altitude balloons

There are groups of hams flying weather balloons stuffed with APRS trackers, digital cameras, repeaters and linear transponders, and other cool stuff. These things are cheaper to build and fly than self-built satellites, but offer a lot of the same features and thrill. I'm aware of two projects which flew during the past couple weeks.

Ilmari-2007 (OH2SIX-12) flew in Finland on 11th of August 2007 and is planned to fly again on 2nd of September. It's equipped with a linear transponder (70cm to 2M, just like amateur satellites - actually the device was designed for a future satellite), a couple of beacons, an APRS tracker transmitting on 437 MHz, a couple of temperature sensors, and an 1.2 GHz Amateur Television (ATV) transmitter sending live video from the heights! The first flight went up to about 30 km (100 000 feet). Here are the links (sorry for the login requirement):

- The track of the first Ilmari-2007 flight
- Current location of Ilmari-2007 - use this link on 2nd of September to follow the flight in real time. The flight is scheduled at 06:00 UTC (but they usually fly late).

SABLE-3 (VA6TNY-11) also flew on 11th of August, in South Alberta, Canada. It was equipped with a 8-megapixel digital still camera taking crisp pictures once every minute, and an APRS tracker. It flew up to 117,597 feet (over 35 km), and took some really nice photos!

- The track of the SABLE-3 flight on 11th of August, 2007

These balloon flights took aprs.he.fi usage to an all-time high - there were over 100 simultaenous users tracking the balloons alone.

If you are planning to launch a balloon, please share the fun and drop me an email, or post a comment on this blog. Thanks!