Dave Akerman

HAB Chase is a simple Android app that has one task – to put you on the Sondehub map (Amateur or Pro/Sonde). That’s it. No receiving. No map. At the moment it’s for Android only; let me know if you want to use it on an iPhone or GPS-equipped iPad. […]

In light of the intense recent interest in what hitherto was an almost unknown hobby, I thought it would be a good idea to answer some questions and correct some misunderstandings that I’ve seen in social media lately. So was an “pico balloon” shot down by an F22? The circumstantial […]

Whilst Delphi targets Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS and Intel Linux, one gaping hole in its repertoire is the Arm-based Raspberry Pi. Taking 2020 as an example, the Pi out-sold the Apple Mac, and with over 40 million sold it’s a large target audience. So whilst I happily develop applications […]

As I hope you are already aware, the venerable HABHUB system is to be decommissioned soon. This was planned to be done by now, but has been postponed to the end of 2022. This won’t be postponed again, so in 2023 there will be no more HABHUB. There’s a replacement, […]

Once the HABHUB server is disconnected next month, the map will stop working and you won’t be able to upload RTTY telemetry to HABHUB. However, you can if you wish continue to use dl-fldigi or fldigi to decode the RTTY, and have HAB Base show a map with your tracker […]

As I hope you’re already aware, the HABHUB system is due to be shut down in October 2022. This system has supported HAB in the UK and elsewhere for many years now, however the hardware is old, the operating system is old and unsupported, the database engine and other installed […]

Yesterday I launched a FlexTrak STM32 tracker to test my latest firmware, test my HAB Base software during a flight, and to try out a Raspberry Pi camera with a wide-angle lens. It was also my first flight using a 3D-printed tracker holder and aerial. 3D-Printing and HAB It took […]

As you may know, several years ago I built a portable HAB receiver based on the Raspberry Pi, with a Star Trek LCARS user interface written in Python. It works well enough and I’ve not revisited the project since then. Instead I developed mobile apps for Android and iOS, to […]

This isn’t my usual type of blog post, but if you’re frustrated with slow and/or unreliable broadband, you might find my experience interesting and useful. With a lot of research, learning and testing, we’ve gone from a feeble 12Mbps down / 1Mbps up broadband to around 200Mbps down 70Mbps. How? […]

Something I use more often in my HAB trackers these days is TDM – Time Division Multiplexing – where instead of transmitting continuously, each tracker transmits only during particular time slots. Since trackers always have a GPS receiver, this just requires software to sync the transmissions with GPS time. The […]