Balloon Track

[AstroFuzz]

Has anyone used Balloon Track? I have yet to use it on a flight since I found it, but I've been using it as one of the places to do daily predictions. I keep running into problems where the predicted max altitude on the flight is about 54,000 feet. Has anyone else seen this problem?

[EA5HAV]

I used it to track one of Kyle's (KJ6KUV) flights. The results were way off, but that was because I kept running it with the wrong vertical rates. I did not find any issue with altitudes, though... Maybe you have 54,000 ft set as your burst altitude in the setup menu?

[AstroFuzz]

No, it's set for 100,000 feet, and it shouldn't be using my burst altitude by default. It should default to the atmospheric sounding file.

[EA5HAV]

IIRC the default behavior is to try to climb to the burst altitude (100,000 ft). If the sounding data is missing from, say 60,000 ft upward, then the program will make up the missing data between 60,000 and 100,000 ft by "extending" the last known wind data up to the burst altitude.

I'm not sure that's related to your problem, though?

[AstroFuzz]

That doesn't seem to be quite it. From what you're saying, it should still give me data above that point where the file ends. It may be somewhat inaccurate data, but it should still do something. Mine just literally ends the flight at about 54,000 feet. I also just realized that this seems to only happen when I run it in the morning. When I grab a new sounding data file later in the day, I get a normal flight.

[EA5HAV]

That sounds more like a bug processing the winds file, in which case I would report it to Rick (the author)... Did you install the beta executable? I was having unit conversion issues and the beta fixed them.

Other than that, I will try to add support for the opentracker and tracker2 aprs formats to the android app so that you can use it before your next flight in october.

[AstroFuzz]

That sounds more like a bug processing the winds file, in which case I would report it to Rick (the author)... Did you install the beta executable? I was having unit conversion issues and the beta fixed them.

Other than that, I will try to add support for the opentracker and tracker2 aprs formats to the android app so that you can use it before your next flight in october.

Thanks! I have the beta version of Balloon Track and it is still giving me that problem. Thanks for working on the APRS formats! I really appreciate that. I'll make sure to give credit on Facebook, Twitter, and our blog when I use the app.

[HABrad]

I used APRSPoint with MapPoint 2010 and it worked like a charm. The trial version of APRSPoint is free and does everything I need it to. I had issues with Balloon Track, even the latest beta, so I only used it for predictions. In all reality though, the online prediction sites listed on eoss.org are really good and I will probably not use Balloon Track at all in the future.