How a joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

How a joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

Aug 19, 2026

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.

In 2020/2021 we ended up doing was building backwards compatible APIs for the Habhub frontend and started testing the Habhub frontend pointed at our backend. It mostly worked. We started receiving all the data rather than just partial data and providing open access to our data via S3. We even started running our own predictor - which is used by my entities today.

With our own predictor running Mark developed a system we call reverse predictions. This is where we take data from an already launched radiosonde and use the wind model to run the predictor backwards which determines a rough the launch location prediction. It works extremely well. We could detect a bunch of radiosonde launch sites that were poorly otherwise documented along with start assigning balloons to launch sites.

Our first taste of dealing with the military

Then in 2021 we received an email

sensitive/military/… installation. As such, we really prefer that it is not explicitly marked on any map.

The thing is though that wind data isn’t just used for predicting the weather. It’s also used to calculate artillery ranging. What we had started doing is accidentally mapping out artillery sites. We decided to keep reverse predictions but we delete launch sites on genuine requests.

The reverse prediction system has also detected many number of military vessels in the ocean.

Lots more development happened on SondeHub with features like websockets and MQTT for live feeds. We disconnected Habhub backend from our proxy and with grant funding from ARDC we were able to setup a prototype amateur high altitude balloon version of SondeHub.

Eventually Habhub was shutdown due to a lack of maintenance and we rushed together to migrate what we could to SondeHub.

$439,000 missile vs party balloon

All was going fine until the 2023 “China spy balloon” incident. SondeHub had a lot more traffic - but our architecture made it fairly manageable.

Then Feb 11th 2023 the US allegedly used AIM-9X Sidewinder to shot down an amateur radio balloon. That morning I woke to high usage alarms in my inbox. SondeHub had been linked to on the Washington Post. Our site managed to handled the extra traffic reasonably well.

Since then we’ve many support requests from .mil and .gov addresses. We’ve also had requests from aviation industry / air control towers.

In Dec 2024 - alarms in my inbox again. This time getting alarms for predictions. Someone decided to...