Radmon.org is funded by enthusiast donations and a small amount of advertising income. We have recurring costs from internet providers, domain registrars, electricity and server and maintenance costs. And development costs too.
Generous donors a few years ago chipped in to buy a decent server, which we managed to get for an excellent price on ebay, and a set of 3 disks to run the system and provide backups. It was amazing what could be got for the money. That system served radmon.org for for a few years and coped with significantly increased station count and traffic too. So thank you to all who contributed.
In November 2019, due to the running costs and increase in electricity cost it became much less viable to run an old and less efficient server (it pulled 200w all day and night long! That's 4.8KWh/day - roughly £1 per day). A solar system was installed, along with batteries and a smaller server (60w) was tried. This didn't work out too well as the inverter losses meant it was wasting 30-40% of the battery power, so Radmon.org was squeezed onto a Raspberry Pi 4b, where it sits today, running happily away.
In April 2022 we replaced the batteries for a new, strong 230Ah battery that has enough capacity to run the server without issue.
No contributions are wasted, all equipment and parts are sourced at the best price/performance mostly from the secondhand market, except for disks and batteries.
Please consider a small recurring donation to allow the continued operation of radmon.org. This allows the easy covering of bills that arrive each month. If there are any one-off requirements, I will list them here.
- In order to improve the performance of Radmon.org we want to purchase another RPi 4b, preferably the 8GB version so we can move the database to a separate server, which should free up some precious cpu cycles on the current server. This will also require a big, fast microSD card, maybe two.
There have also been several contributions in the form of code. The pyradmon script (now Py3Radmon.py), BASH script, lots of arduino code and RH's Radiation Logger. And finally, all the stations and forum users that have contributed to Radmon by simply being a part of the community, because it is you that make Radmon.org what it is, for without you, it is just a server.