Flood-Net
A browser-based tool for planning and maintaining radio and satellite telemetry networks — the field stations that measure rainfall and river levels, the repeaters that relay them, and the radio paths between.
Environmental telemetry stations sit in catchments and report by radio. A reading leaves a station, is relayed by one or more repeaters, and arrives at a base station. Keeping a network of them working means knowing which repeater serves which station, what path a signal actually takes over the terrain, what else is transmitting nearby, and what was found the last time somebody drove out to the site. Flood-Net is where those questions are answered in one place instead of five spreadsheets.
It runs entirely in the browser. There is no installer and no build step: the application is static files, and the station records live in a Postgres database it reads over HTTP.
What it does
- Stations & networks
- Station records and site photographs, where each station's orifice outlet, pits, benchmarks, gauge boards and orifice run are, an interactive map with terrain and elevation profiles, repeater pass-range analysis and hop chains, network clustering, printable radio path map sheets, and CSV and Radio Mobile export.
- Interference
- Licensed transmitters near a site from the ACMA register, what changed in that register and when, and a workbench for building and scoring an interference case.
- Addresses & packets
- ALERT address arithmetic and bit-flip ghosting analysis, a graph of address collisions across a network, and decoders for ALERT, ALERT2 and HFEM telemetry formats.
- Telemetry
- Incoming message logs, raw field data, rainfall and level charting, and a serial monitor for talking to a logger on a bench.
- Site visits
- Structured inspection forms, site maintenance tasks, and the history of what was recorded at each station over time.
- Surveying
- A station's level survey booked on a phone and reduced as it is read, with readings taken off a digital level's display by the camera and kept as evidence; the level's two-peg check; and a refresher on doing both.
What it is not
Flood-Net is not a flood warning service, and it does not issue warnings, forecasts or public alerts. It is engineering tooling for the radio networks that telemetry travels over — an asset register, a path planner and a fault-finding aid. Nothing here should be read as an official statement about flooding, river conditions or public safety.
It is also not an official product of, and is not endorsed by, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology or any other agency. It is an independent open-source project that happens to be useful to people who look after these networks. For official Australian flood warnings and river height data, go to the Bureau of Meteorology.
Reading and editing
Station data is public and can be read with nobody signed in — that is a deliberate decision rather than an oversight, and the reasoning is written down in the repository. Editing is different: saving a change requires a session, and the database itself checks the signed-in address against an editors list on every write. The rules are enforced inside Postgres, not by the page being polite about it.
Open source
Flood-Net is MIT licensed and developed in the open. The source, the issue tracker and the documentation — including how access and data protection actually work — are on GitHub at cdomotor-g/MegaNet (the repository keeps the project's earlier name, MegaNet). Questions, bug reports and corrections are welcome there.