HBAL345 spotted by my receiver over the Gulf of Mexico from Austin. Seems odd it’s not transmitting altitude data. If it’s a weather balloon, it seems that would be important data. Any resource out there to find altitude of balloons?
Given the limited data at earth.nullschool.net/#current/w … 29.12,3000 it is probably between 70 hPA (60,000 feet) and 10 hPA (100,000 feet), judging by speed and direction.
Looking at FR24, they are showing it at 64600’.
I believe that is the same balloon that crossed central Florida yesterday afternoon.
If you have an older dump1090, it doesn’t decode altitudes above ca. 62k ft correctly. see github.com/mutability/dump1090/ … 8cc65b201c
I’m configured to auto-updated, not to mention this particular receiver is only about a month or so old. Just to clarify, I’m using piaware, version 2.1-5. How can I tell whether it uses this fixed version of dump1090?
Does FA autoupdate dump1090-mutability or just FA’s flavor of dump1090?
I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know what the difference is or why I’d have something other than what comes with piaware.
BTW, I went out to Mt. Bonnell hoping to see the balloon. I think the haze was too bright. I imagined a possibility of seeing it, so I used heywhatsthat to figure out how high it would appear. I figured about 5 degrees and about 200 miles away. At that distance the size would be about 10 seconds of arc, not terribly big. I hoped that just after sunset on the ground it would show up brightly. Not at that distance, though.
BTW, I am getting an elevation now, 58,000 feet. That’s below the 62k threshold for the error, so I’d guess the piaware code has that bug in place.
faup1090 has the fix, so high altitudes are decoded and uploaded via piaware correctly.
The current FlightAware dump1090 package does not have the fix, so the locally-decoded data you see on the web interface won’t show those very high altitudes (but the messages are still forwarded to faup1090, which does decode it correctly)
Another one over Calif.
flightaware.com/live/flight/HBAL345
Google search on ‘HBAL345’ found one source indicating it is a Google Balloon.
⇒ BA107B [FR24] [FlightStats] [FlightAware]
Altitude: 50900 ft | 15505 m Squawk: n/a
Speed: 19 kt | 35 km/h RSSI: -34.1 dBFS
Track: 90° (East) Last seen: now
Position: 39.039°, -120.970°
Distance from Site:
That’s the same one as my original post.
You’re right. It does seem to get around 
For most of the day I’ve been picking up HBAL396 between 54900 and 62000 feet, currently near Williston North Dakota (245nm). I see that it has three ‘friends’ currently over Washington State that should be heading east soon.
For the past few months there have been one or two a month passing across Western Canada, sometimes both within range at the same time. As they rise and sink, they drift in and out of reception range.
At moment Germany / Saxony
D-OMMR 3FC639
Private DOMMR
Germany Zivil
Schroeder Fire Balloons Hot Air Balloon BALL