SBARC Tech's Help Solve Global APRS Flaw
It all began when Levi Maaia, K6LCM, was engaged with yet another of his stratosphere weather balloon experiments at the Anacapa School. An experimental sensor array data feeding a Byonics TNC to the SBARC APRS 144.39 system turned into unexpected results. Levi soon discovered a reporting flaw on the aprs.fi global reporting system. He noticed his WX data wasn't showing up on aprs.fi, but it was showing up on findu.com. The issue quickly got the attention of Shaw Takeuchi, AE6BL, of SBARC, Heikki Hannikainen (Hessu) in Finland who is the author of aprs.fi as well as Pete Loveall, AE5PL, author of javaparssrvr. Lead troubleshooter was Lynn W Deffenbaugh (Mr), KJ4ERJ, author of APRSISCE for Windows Mobile and Win32 who was assigned to the case. It was discovered that the global complex network of data servers in multiple layers had two servers which were misconfigured causing the system to drop WX data coming from APRS.
Worldwide flash emails were going back and forth this week to help nail down the heretofore undiscovered flaw in the system. With Levi discovering the problem and Shaw defending the SBARC configuration it focused the the worldwide experts on solving the server problem. There is much more detail to this story which hopefully can be documented for a good Key-Klix article. You guy's did a GREAT JOB of global team work in communicating the data back to the authors in solving their undiscovered problem.