In 2017, I was introduced to weather balloon hunting by Mark VK5QI. The Australian balloon chasing community was small, with only Melbourne and Adelaide radiosondes tracked on Habhub. By 2018, sondehub.org was registered as a joke—a simple redirect to Habhub with a radiosonde filter.

However, as more data poured in, we began proxying it through Sonde Hub to avoid rate limiting. By 2019, Habhub servers were struggling, prompting us to build our own APIs and frontend. That same year, we detected a drop in launches due to the GPS rollover, which affected Vaisala equipment.

In 2021, we received an email about a sensitive/military installation, revealing our reverse prediction system was accidentally mapping artillery sites. We kept the feature but removed launch sites on request. The 2023 “China spy balloon” incident increased traffic, and we handled it well.

Then in Dec 2024, our API was smashed by repeated requests. After investigation, we suspected a private company misusing our backend. We reached out and eventually contacted AWS, whose network was the source IP.

They flagged a Lambda function scraping our API. In 2025, the Office of the Secretary of War (Intelligence and Security) requested data, but we required payment since there was no community benefit.