SondenMonitor groundtrack (.txt)
A groundtrack .txt file is a plain-text position log written by SondeMonitor, PC software that decodes live telemetry from weather-balloon radiosondes and plots their ground track — the flight path traced over the ground.
At a glance
| Extension | .txt |
| Encoding | text |
| By | COAA |
History
SondeMonitor is developed by COAA. It decodes analog and digital radiosonde telemetry received over a UHF scanner and a PC soundcard, and can display the ground track of a GPS-equipped digital sonde live during flight or afterwards from recorded telemetry. No publication date is documented for the software or for this specific export format.
Where it is used
Radio amateurs and radiosonde trackers ("bounty hunters" recovering landed sondes) use SondeMonitor to follow a balloon's ascent and descent in real time; this plain-text file is one of the position logs it can produce for a completed flight.
Structure
A fixed-width text file, one line per trackpoint: a point number, latitude, longitude, elevation, a climb/sink rate in metres per second, and a time in HH:mm:ss.SSS — matching the format's own column header, "Trackpunkt Nord Ost Hoehe Aufstiegs-/Abstieg m/sek Zeit". This column layout comes directly from RouteConverter's own source comment; no separate public specification for the file was found.
How widespread
SondeMonitor is still sold by COAA as of this writing (a licensed, paid tool after a trial period); the format is specific to it and to the amateur-radio radiosonde-tracking hobby rather than any broader vendor ecosystem.
RouteConverter support
| Reads | groundtrack vom SondenMonitor |
| Writes | groundtrack vom SondenMonitor |
RouteConverter reads and writes this format. On write, the climb/sink-rate column is not round-tripped — it is always emitted as "0.0" — and each trackpoint's number is re-parsed from its description where possible, falling back to its position in the file otherwise.