Tutorials

Weather Dashboard: A Self-Hosted, NWS-Grade Weather Operations Console Bottom line up front. I built and now open-sourced a self-hosted weather operations dashboard built around the US National Weather Service api.weather.gov and a stack of other free public sources (NOAA SPC, AviationWeather Center, NDBC, USGS, RainViewer, IEM). For fun, I also pull in APRS stations from my SDR rig. It renders active alerts with VTEC parsing and polygon overlays, NEXRAD and MRMS radar with time-machine playback, severe-weather products from SPC including ProbSevere v3 and GLM lightning, aviation METAR/TAF/AIRMET/SIGMET, marine buoys and tides, USGS earthquakes, AirNow AQI, and a 7-day NWS forecast. It speaks CAP 1.2 to other systems, fans out severe alerts to Slack/Discord/generic webhooks, and supports VAPID web push for the browser. Repository: github.com/RobertDWhite/weather-dashboard. License: MIT. Multi-arch images at ghcr.io/robertdwhite/weather-dashboard-{api,ui}. The image I run in production is the same image GitHub Actions builds from main. ...

This post was originally published at w3rdw.radio, the ham radio blog of Robert White (W3RDW). It is cross-posted here for the WhiteMatter Tech audience. Always-On SDR: Building a Multi-Band Radio Intelligence Platform on Kubernetes I have been quietly building something i am pretty excited about. The idea started simple enough: i wanted a permanent, always-on radio monitor for 2m. It grew into something considerably larger. Today the stack covers 2m, 70cm, and the full HF spectrum from 3–28 MHz simultaneously: recording, decoding, transcribing, and tagging everything it hears, around the clock, with no manual intervention. ...

Setting Up an ADS‑B Flight Tracker with a Cheap Antenna on Kubernetes (RKE2 and ArgoCD) This is the Kubernetes version of my earlier Docker‑based ADS‑B guide. In this setup, everything is defined in YAML and deployed via ArgoCD, and changes are tracked in Git and synced automatically to the cluster. Access is handled through an NGINX Ingress with TLS from cert‑manager, which is how I publish the ADS‑B UI at adsb.w3rdw.radio. If you’re comfortable editing YAML and committing to Git, you’ll feel right at home. ...

W3RDW Blog - First Post This post is copied from a separate site where I plan to document content related to one of my hobbies, HAM radio. This post is the first post I shared on my other site, https://w3rdw.radio. In the future, I plan to only post HAM radio content on the W3RDW site. You can find a link in the top right corner of my WhiteMatterTech site. Setting Up an ADS-B Flight Tracker with a Cheap Antenna and Docker on Ubuntu In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the process of setting up an ADS-B flight tracker using a cheap antenna and Docker on Ubuntu. ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast) is a surveillance technology that allows aircraft to determine their position via satellite navigation and periodically broadcast it. By setting up your own ADS-B receiver, you can track flights in your area and contribute to the global flight tracking network. ...

Overview In this post, I will detail how I run my Matrix Server with Docker-Compose, how I use my Matrix Server as an encrypted notifications hub, and how I federate my Matrix Server over a Cloudflare tunnel (using Cloudflare’s Zero Trust interface). Short Cybersecurity Note Matrix Servers can be a part of your cybersecurity stack in your homelab or business. The component pertinent to cybersecurity related to Matrix Servers is encryption. If you’re pursuing a CISSP, you will want to be highly familiar with encryption and the process by which it is achieved. ...