Radiosonde Hunting

There are over hundred of weather sondes sent over the Europe each day from different locations for weather forecasts and other scientific or military purposes. Weather sondes are expendable electronic devices to measure wind speed, air temperature, humidity and pressure. Sondes attached to a balloon filled with hydrogen or helium ascent up into the stratosphere where the balloon bursts and the sonde falls down back to earth with a parachute. 

How to collect wireless sensors readings using rtl_433 and display them using OpenWrt

Goal: to use an OpenWrt capable router to receive wireless sensors reading and log them using OpenWrt luci-app-statistics module.
Why: because my router is always on anyway, so why not to use it to also log wireless sensors readings?
What is needed?

• A router (or any other device) with USB port(s) that is supported by OpenWrt
• A RTL-SDR dongle
• Wireless temperature/humidity sensors supported by the rtl_433 application

Note: I’m referring to the old OpenWrt project name, which is currently called LEDE, which in turn will be called OpenWrt again. It’s because of the nonsense they started some time ago by forking the project and calling it LEDE because they couldn’t agree on which side they should start counting bits. Some of them there little-endians and the others big-endians. Finally they have agreed to use both approaches and now they are busy merging everything back together and use the good old name [sic!]. So the next release is supposed to be called OpenWrt as their branch name suggest. At the moment this branch is not usable but maybe it will be released at the end of the year. It is still not known which year should it be…

How to Connect the rtl_433 to a remote rtl_tcp server

One of the issues with the rtl_433 application is that it is not possible to connect it to a remote rtl_tcp server using syntax supported by other SDR application like gqrx. One of proposed solutions is to use the TCP enabled version of the librtlsdr which is a bit complicated. There's actually a much simpler solution.