1. hi, I´m looking into hackaday for over 2 years now and this is the first time I feel the need to write something. Also I like the idea of getting a full working hack that i can just immitate, I think it´s great to have more of this kind of challenges where somebody figuered something out but hasn´t got the whole thing right yet. This kind of project prevents us all from becoming skriptkiddies!! Well ok it only prevents me from becoming one, but anyway!!! I just looked into ebay for some radiosondes and i´m defenetly going to work on this for the next week (or month). Keep up the good work and post more of these challenges. and yes I too think it´s cheesy what I just wrote but hey....

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by mentor

2. Just a follow up, the above link doesn't work - use this one... http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sondemonitor/ Good Luck! Ken_S.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Ken_S.

3. sed 's/powered/controlled'

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Standard Mischief

4. You can find formulas on the web for calculating location from the doppler signals. The math is fairly hairy, though. On the other hand, that sondemonitor program, for one, will do the math for you. There's bound to be some other GPS calculating software out there.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by furtim

5. displacement doesn't help if you don't know the initial location though.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by dirk

6. Surely if you have doppler measurments, then provided you have a continuous data stream, then a doublediff would give you a displacement?

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Liam

7. There must be a bunch of old cheap phones on ebay with built in GPS for E-911 An old cell phone should have everything you need, a gps receiver, a digital microprocessor, a power supply, and a microprocessor powered transmitter. Thus the hack would be entirely in firmware

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Standard Mischief

8. I concur with Liam.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Spork

9. I had bought several Vaisala RS80 Radiosondes off E-bay six months ago or so, and was also unsucessful at figuring them out. I created a Yahoo Forum for Vaisala RS80 Radiosondes (at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Vaisala_RS80_Radiosonde/ ) and received this response, but never found the time to follow up on it; it may be helpful... Good Luck! Ken_S. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Hi Members of this group might be interested in the SondeMonitor group (also on Yahoo). SondeMonitor is a program that can decode the data from Vaisala sondes and display the measurements in various ways. The RS80 transmits Pressure, Temperature and Humidity using analogue tones in the range 8-10kHz on a 400MHz carrier. Provided that you have a suitable radio receiver, SondeMonitor can measure and plot these tones so that you can watch the sonde as it goes up (and down again). The more modern RS92 sondes are digital and in addition to the meteorological measurements, it also sends GPS data down in the telemetry. SondeMonitor can plot the met data from these digital sondes but it can also plot the ground track from the GPS data. This opens the possibility of tracking and perhaps catching one of these digital sondes. www.coaa.co.ukl/sondemonitor.htm Regards Bev COAA

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Ken_S.

10. Possible application - tracking ground movement relative to a stationary benchmark. This could be useful to scientists remotely tracking glacial movement, seismic displacement near volcanoes and fault lines, etc. The shift in coordinates could be recorded at a central unit on the benchmark, and remotely phoned in once a day. I know nothing about what systems are already out there, or how to put the whole thing together - I bow to your collective expertise. It seemed like a good idea.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Dan

11. I have some of these sondes. The GPS is send as a satelite number + AFAIK a 24 bit velocity, not that difficult to see on a protocol analyser. So I guess to use the signal, one uses a stationary reference receiver and an ephemeris, to see where the various satelites are. Then integrate the speed to find the position. The LORAN sondes seem to modulate the raw LORAN signal on the 403 MHz carrier (what I saw on an oscilloscope) I picked up 24 of these on eBay for about £1 each ;-)

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Wim Ton

12. Thanks for all the comments / suggestions, looks like there is actually a relatively simple solution to the problem (although I have not currently managed to get it working). Follow-up article is now available at: http://www.digitaldawgpound.org/nick84/post=133

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Nick

13. Ok, since I do not have that device (the first I have heard of) and the protocol it uses, following will be purely theoratical (exactly what I do for living!): You can use convolution theorem to obtain particular speed relative to the sender sattelite if you can overlap the incoming signals at different times, if you have exactly the differentiation at a specific interval, the process is even easier. Convolotion programs are cheap cpu-wise and source code can be found for example in numerical recipes in c. Then what you need to do is have a lock on at least 3 different sattelites and triangulate your coordinates using simple vector texel geometry. This is also very cheap. If you want error correction then you can connect one or more sattelites depending on your algorithm. If you do not want complicated electronics, all these steps can be done using analog components (ever heard of analog computers?) The problem is decoding of the signal I guess. Is there a possiblity that the outcoming signal is analog or some ADC data?

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by obm

14. hi, nice post, i will try, get a aerosonde on ebay, im developing a u.a.v system, but i use a expensive maxstream to get the telemetry data, maybe it could be sheapest :) . Andres Herrera.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Andres herrera

15. the best cell phone GPS solution is mologogo: http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/11/mologogo-adds-tracking-to-any-nextel-gps-phone/ it uses nextel phones, because most (all?) nextel phones have real, actual gps chipsets in them, and you can get their location without using minutes. last i heard it had a good following, and they had developed the software pretty well. -Taylor

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Taylor Alexander

16. My understanding is that the CDMA cell phones don't have full GPS receivers in them, either. They simply transmit the doppler measurements to the network, and the NETWORK does all the hard work of figuring out what location a doppler reading corresponds to. This is good because the network is a lot more powerful than your phone, so can get a location from a single reading, instead of taking a number of minutes to get an initial fix -- an advantage for a battery-limited device. So anyway, cell phone GPS might be a good avenue to explore after all...

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Michael Dwyer

17. {bold] E911 != GPS [/bold] There are a number of cell phones out there that have real, true to life, honest to god, GPS receivers inside of them. Here's one press release from March 2001: http://www.forbes.com/2001/03/28/0328tentech.html not all E-911 phones use GPS, (some triangulate off of cell towers), but some do. Again, the GPS receiver is connected to the microprocessor, which is connected to a radio transmitter. All you would need is a firmware upgrade.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Standard Mischief

18. This may not be all that helpful, however, if someone does manage to figure out how to interpret the signal, perhaps with a computer, I'd recommend conscidering an fpga for the actual processing. Fpgas can do things in parralel, making up for their mediocre speed. Decryption, analysis, perhaps involving FFT on a binary stream (you have to have an A-D converter) are all very parralizable. You can have the fpga manage stuff like position smoothing and deltas through doplar and such. Fpgas are also rather low power. Anyway, good luck!

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by Botty

19. @Standard Mischief: E911 != GPS On CDMA phones it might be possible, I would like to see a hack to get the A-GPS information out of them.

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by danger mouse

20. If the sonde is the one mentioned from Sippican, then right there on the data sheet most of the information needed is presented to fetch the data. Now, calculations.. another story. He has the radio reception, but he mentioned hoping there would be a chip that would decode the audio.. well.. not so much a chip as an OLD MODEM. Certainly some hacking would be needed on the modem, but 400 baud digital biphase over an audio circuit is about as simple as it gets for an old telephone modem! The audio from the receiver should couple straight in? All my knowledge of radio systems is theory and no practice so I could be way off here. And.. if all he wants is the GPS itself, then that talks to the micro that puts everything out over radio by RS232 (again, stated right there in the datasheet).

Posted at 3:07PM on Sep 3rd 2006 by OrbnLgnd