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CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST FINDU NEWS!







findU is a database archiving weather, position, telemetry, and message data.
The primary source of data is an amateur radio system called APRS, some weather
data comes from an internet based system called the Citizen Weather Observer
Program. This large (58 GB) database is hosted on two servers using data
replication techniques. the data is constantly updated (about 20 new reports
come in every second), and is accessed via a number of dynamic web pages. Some
examples:



Weather reports       Position reports       Long term vehicle tracking
      Telemetry       Messages

Reports are also archived from an amateur radio payload aboard the International
Space Station which relays APRS reports from amateur radio operators around the
globe.

Among findU's most significant uses is the forwarding of over a hundred thousand
near-realtime weather observations to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration daily, where the data is checked for accuracy, and used by NOAA
and the National Weather Service in a variety of ways.

Here is a page that describes all of the CGIs which are available on this
server. This sometimes lags behind the latest developments, but it is the best
place to start. Check the news link at the top of this page, and especially the
APRS SIG at TAPR, for the very latest news.

Directly creating a URL by editing the parameters is not meant for beginners,
though by reading the documentation and experiementing a bit, anyone should be
able to get the results they are after. Other people have written web pages that
allow you to enter requests to findU via forms, this is an easier way to build
the URL you need. I'm sure I've missed some, email me your favorites.

URLDescription http://www.wulfden.org/APRSQuery.shtmlN1BQ's page, the original
http://www.qsl.net/n9wtm/N9WTM http://www.phrozen-neon.com/alarc/aprs.phpN0ESC
http://www.proaviator.com/findu/K4IFR

email questions and comments to Steve Dimse steve@dimse.com. First, make sure
the question isn't answered in the FAQ below...

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FINDU FAQS


CAN I TRACK MY CAR (OR ANYTHING ELSE) ON FINDU?

Absolutely. The system is open to all amateur radio operators. A license is
required, but it is not difficult to obtain. If you are in the US, and want
information on obtaining a license, see the ARRL web site for info. Also, there
are many commercial sites that can do tracking without using amateur radio.




I HAVE AN AMATEUR RADIO LICENSE, WHERE CAN I FIND OUT HOW TO GET STARTED IN APRS
(OR ANY OTHER APRS QUESTION NOT CONCERNING FINDU)?

I'm sorry, but I'm not able to answer these queries due to a lack of time. At
one time I kept a few links to beginner web sites here, but they come and go too
fast for me to keep up. Use Google to find some that are available now. TAPR's
aprssig is a good place to ask these questions, you can sign up here.




WHY DOES MY STATION'S INFORMATION NOT SHOW UP ON FINDU?

If you are a member of the Citizen Weather program, the most common problem is
an incorrectly entered latitude and longitude. Some programs do not check the
number enetered for validity, but the system has a very specific format it
requires, so check that the information is entered correctly. For other
problems, you should get support from the person or company that produces the
program you are using.

The process of reports getting to findU via amateur radio and APRS is complex.
First, your station transmits the data, likely it must travel through one or
more digipeaters before reaching an internet gateway, which forwards it to a hub
in the APRS Internet System, and then finally to findU.com.

Problems can occur anywhere along this path, though by far the most common are
in the early stages...an individual's RF system has a problem, their path is not
set correctly to be digipeated by their local RF network, or their local IGate
is down or misconfigured. From the internet there is absolutely no way I can
diagnose these problems. Your best bet is to seek out a local APRS user that can
listen for you on RF, and try to figure out what is wrong. If you are writting
your own software, or manually entered an APRS string into a hardware or
software configuration file, you may have misformatted the data. findU tends to
follow strict interpretation of the APRS standard, and some errors may be
displayable in some client programs but not findU, a typical example is an
incorrect number of digits in a lat/lon. You can always check findU's parsing
error page to see if findU is detecting an error.






ON THE WEATHER PAGE, IT SAYS THERE IS NO RADAR WITHIN 150 MILES, BUT THERE IS!

Currently findU only has US radar sites, if you are in the US and this is
happening to you, let me know.

I have no problems with adding other radars, but the following requirements must
be met:

1. The radar image alone must be available in GIF or PNG format with a fixed URL
and constant scale. I may be able to work with JPEG or other graphic formats, if
everything else is possible let me know.

2. Image provided without any copyright restrictions (this is the big gotcha,
I've not found any outside the US that meet this requirement). Here is the US
National Weather Services statement: "The information on government servers are
in the public domain, unless specifically annotated otherwise, and may be used
freely by the public." If you are submitting another site, either submit the URL
of a page stating there are no restrictions, or the contact information of the
person that stated the use was acceptible.



Some countries allow non-commercial use, and while findU itself is
non-commercial, I am unable to guarantee how people use findU, in fact I know of
several sites that do use findU for commercial purposes. Commercial use must be
acceptible, or an exception made for findU, I will not accept the risk of
copyright violation.



3. Someone must create a geo file for the image(s). This is detailed on



http://www.findu.com/geo.html



I do not have time to do all this, so if you want your local radar images, it is
up to you.




WHY DON'T YOU TRACK DIGIPEATERS, SO I CAN SEE WHO IS USING MY DIGI (OR ANY OTHER
RF PROPAGATION RELATED ISSUE)

This is a matter of findU (or more generally the APRS Internet System) being the
wrong tool for the job. My design of the APRS IS was based on getting data
distributed widely, not about characterizing the RF network. Therefore, the
system is designed at each stage to filter out duplicate versions of the same
data packet. However, it is precisely the differences between different
instances of the same packet that would allow you to draw interesting and/or
definitive conclusions about the RF network and propagation.

The decision in favor of duplicate filtering was, and still is, the correct
one...without it, the APRS IS data stream would be perhaps ten times its present
size, which is already big enough to cause problems. PropNet now has set up an
alternate network which is suitable for propagation studies.




IS THE SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE?

No. Commercialization is the primary reason I've not open-sourced my code. I've
gotten a surprising number of requests from persons inside the GIS industry to
either give or sell them my code, or consult for them. After looking at a lot of
the commercial systems, the entire APRS system really holds its own, and on many
counts including (in-my-not-so-humble-opinion) findU, it is better than anything
else out there. Winning the Earthlink AVL competition to me was objective
confirmation of this opinion. If my code were GPL'ed, it would probably be used
in commercial systems. I get my satisfaction from producing a useful system that
does cool things, and letting people use it for free.

I had expected that the Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise I went on October 2001 would
convince me once and for all of the benefits of free (as in speech) software. In
fact, it had the opposite effect...I spent a lot of time with the infamous RMS
(Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation) since we ate
dinner at the same eight person table. Let's just say the discussion was as
enjoyable as, and far spicier than, the Holland America food! After all the
arguments and much contemplation, I've come to agree with the equally infamous
ESR (Eric Raymond, also on the cruise, talk about storm-at-sea!), that RMS and
FSF are seeking power (defined as the ability to make decisions that affect
others), not freedom (the ability to make decisions that affect yourself). Now
that I really understand it, I find the FSF vision of the world a scarier place
than even a Microsoft controlled world. Software is a creative work (RMS
agrees), the disposition of which rightfully belongs in the hands of the creator
or their employer (RMS turns red and starts screaming, because useful creations
like a home improvement TV show, how-to book, or software program, morally
belong to the collective). I believe the decision to donate code for the public
good is an altruistic act, not a moral imperative, and a choice deserving
admiration, not expectation.

There are other reasons besides commercialization, like the amount of time it
would take to document, distribute, support, and re-integrate code from an open
source project. If you want the code, think about the reason for a minute. Is it
because you want to see the magic? Nothing magic, this is a simple, though
large, database driven web application, there are hundreds of examples you can
view on the web, and dozens of books that you could read on this topic. It is to
create your own findU site? How useful would that be, and if you do draw users
away from the original, how can the public be sure any bugs or improvements will
be on your site? Perhap to change one thing that bothers you and send it back to
me? When am I to find time to judge the worthiness of all the modifications?
Something else? I am always willing to listen to other viewpoints, but I need a
compelling reason to open the code, and I just haven't found it yet.

My choice for now is to keep control of the code, and provide a service to the
community for free (as in beer!). Not a purely altruistic decision, but the one
I am most comfortable with. In the event I someday lose interest in findU, it
will be passed to someone else for development. Over the years many have offered
donations, and I've decided to accept them now, as well as place Google adds on
the pages. None of this will make me rich, but perhaps snough will accumulate to
eventually pay for the next server findU will run upon.




WHY DON'T YOU ADD...

If I never came up with another idea, the things I already have on my list will
keep me busy for a couple of years. In other words, I have lots of plans that I
haven't implemented, so I may already to be planning to do it. However, if you
have an idea you'd like to share, please do so, for two reasons. First, it may
be something great I hadn't thought of, and second, my priorities are to some
extent dictated by what people want to see, so voting for what you'd like may
get it done sooner. However, please don't be hurt or surprised if I don't answer
your email quickler (or sometimes at all). I do my best, but at some point it
becomes counter-productive...I'd rather code than write email.




CAN I PUBLISH LINKS TO THE DYNAMIC PAGES, OR INCORPORATE THE DYNAMIC IMAGES IN
MY OWN PAGE?

In general, yes. Keep in mind this system is in heavy development. The CGI
interfaces to any of the pages and images may change without prior notice. If
you use these links, then it is your responsibility to check them often to
assure that they still function! Please don't email with broken link problems!!!
Dynamic findU HTML pages must not be used to extract data which goes into a
database...in other words, no screen scrapers. If you have a project that needs
to do this, you should either use another database as a backend or create your
own database by parsing the APRS data stream. Several open source APRS parsers
are available. Lately there has been a great increase in the number of people
attempting screen-scraping, so I must clarify my position. A single access
generated from a user action (starting a program, pushing a button, etc.) is
allowed, while any repetetive access by a program is NOT ALLOWED. This is
necessary because a single program can use as much resource as dozens of human
users, and I do not have the capacity to support this sort of use. I will be
monitoring for inappropriate access and blocking IPs where I find a problem.

Recent events force me again to clarify this. If you use findU upon some
user-generated action, please think hard about the most efficient way to
accomplish this. I've had people use findU to show unaltered radar images by
using an off-the-radar station. findU had to fetch the image, realize there was
nothing to draw, then send it out again. All this instead of the person getting
the image directly from the NWS. Others grab a list of hundreds of raw reports
and use one. Please act as if you realize that findU is the limited resource it
actually is. If you have questions about any use please ask.




CAN I USE FINDU FOR SPECIAL EVENTS?

Yes! There are a bunch of examples, from the Big Ride (3000 mile, 6 week bike
trek across the US) to balloon races, marathons, road races. The easiest way
(from my perspective anyway) is for you to write your own web pages and insert
findU images like plot, breadcrumb, and radar-find using IMG tags in your html.
There are other things I can do, like writing a custom web page, as I did for
the largest APRS event, the Baker to Vegas run or the SuitSat experiment on the
International Space Station. This sort of thing takes time, so I need to limit
it to things that will get some main-stream publicity (I love to show off what
ham radio can do). Please, if you want this, contact me as soon as possible, as
my schedule sometimes gets tight! The more lead time you give me, the more
likely I am to produce something really cool for you.




YOUR IMAGES DON'T SHOW ON MY BROWSER!

This site uses PNG images (Portable Network Graphics) for the dynamic images
rather than GIFs. This was because UniSys held a patent on the compression used
in GIFs, PNG is an improved format without patent problems. All of the latest
browsers accept these graphics, and ones that are a bit older can handle them
through Apple's Quicktime plugin. Recently these patents have expired. The
library I use to create these images, GD, is now available in a form that will
create GIF images. Had this been the case when I first created findU, I
certainly would have used GIF. At this point, PNG is close to a universal
format, and I do not feel converting my code to GIF would be worth my effort. If
you have a different opinion, please feel free to share your reasons with me.




I'M WITH SUPERMEGAWEATHERSITE.COM, I WANT TO USE YOUR DATA!

First, this is not my data, and I do not feel I have the right to allow other
people's data to be used for commercial purposes. Technically the data is not
copyrighted, it is legal to write a your own APRS parser to extract the data
from the live APRS internet stream, but because commercial use of findU would
increase the load without giving anything back to the APRS community, I must
insist you not use my server to harvest the data.

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About the findU server




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APRS is a registered trademark of APRS Software and Bob Bruninga, WB4APR.