Electrosense project undergoing abandonment?

[AndreasWarby]

"Active" sensors show "no data" when one tries to view their spectra.  This condition has been in place for a number of weeks now.

I sent a message to con...@electrosense.org eight days ago, without response.

Number of "online" sensors showing at https://electrosense.org/#!/ has fallen to 56.

The project appears to be adrift at sea, with nobody in the wheelhouse.

Any comments or news on the status and future of Electrosense?

Best regards,

Andreas / VA2WBT

[Sterling Mann]

Several months ago I messaged Roberto to get a better idea of the incentive model of electrocoins, and it really didn't persuade me. What he didn't seem to acknowledge is that in this space, which is led majorly by hobbyists, the reward is mostly intrinsic. That is to say, the reward is actually receiving and using the data, and the extrinsic reward - electrocoins - don't really mean anything. Crowdsourced ADS-B monitoring is so popular because not only does a host have a new "sense" of the world from their own home, they also get to use everyone else's sensors to monitor, experiment, and research air traffic, with the added bonus of a tangible reward of free premium accounts on flight trackers. Also, the people who might be into electrosense are instead hosting their receivers on sites like SDR.hu, WebSDR, on Broadcastify, or on the various AIS/ADSB/APRS data aggregators.

Electrosense seems to be an early technical proof of concept for general RF spectrum monitoring but there's a lot less cool factor (than ADS-B for example) and as such a lot fewer operators. I personally don't see many more getting into it. Corporations that need remote RF data acquisition systems already have a number of methods to achieve their goal. Even governments aren't showing much interest in it, despite a very good value proposition of realtime multilateration of spectrum interference and pirate operations. Moreover the implications it has for cognitive and agile spectrum usage are also very interesting. But at the end of the day it really doesn't provide you or me with any real benefit over other means (the best I can see is frequency occupancy in 10MHz sections; I can't do any realtime receiving, demodulation, or signal analysis like I would be able to do with a WebSDR or KiwiSDR stream) so I don't think Electrosense is going to last very long without some changes, especially in the Americas (there's lots more radio hobbyists in the EU!).

To be fair there is some activity still going on in the github and there's a workshop coming up, and my observation of the available data is superficial (like I've not played with the API at all) but I think the powers at be are more or less busy coders bouncing from project to project. Development is generally pretty slow on these sorts of things.

Sterling N0SSC

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[Sterling Mann]

This paper describes the Electrosense+ model, which brings electrocoins, power spectrum analysis, and real-time decoding. That was sent to me in July and was revised in Sept 2019.

[jaMEs J0hN m0REtOn]

G'day from West Australia yep mine's been no data since early Dec 2019 it's running on empty I'm afraid.. I also Emailed and left them tweets asking wtf is going on.?? But I also received no reply at all that was Dec 2019 when it first started to happen. If I go back to a previous time say 1 or two hrs back it displays the Spectrum data as it shud but just won't do it in real time

[AndreasWarby]

Thanks Sterling and James, for your comments.  I can understand that this project might not be top on any of the principal project members' radars anymore.  The feeding community should be informed about this, however.

The provision of data to this project does use quite a lot of uploading bandwidth, and of course a little bit of electricity.  Collectively, our feeding community has a carbon footprint that's likely not insignificant.  It would be good to know that what we are doing still has some purpose!  Also, late last year I received a nice extender board from Belgium, so was happy to begin contributing data covering a larger spectrum.  Unfortunately, the "free" board attracted quite a large import duty fee that I paid from my own pocket and that I rationalized for myself as an effective contribution to the project.  I know many of the other fellow feeders in this community have given a lot more to try to help ElectroSense out.  Given this reality, it would be very good to have an update on the project's current status and the planned future, as seen by its main proponents.

Sincerely,

Andreas / VA2WBT