The Tomsk measuring station in Russia took their 15 minute image updates Private on September 7th to instead sell them to subscribers. Their 3-4 time a day updates are still occurring, so far, for the public, via their telegram channel, and we continue to have those in the App as well.
The price they’re demanding to our App for all the images every 15 minutes, for the year, isn’t something we can afford. Additionally, using their freely published images is one thing. Payments to Russia currently, on the other hand, are legally and morally questionable.
Tomsk’s new “system”, to get the images directly from them, is quite sketchy and technologically fraught. They’re requiring everyone’s physical address, a tip account in rubles, and then people have to make manual email requests for the charts that they want, each time they want an update, which is then delivered via email, in pdf format… it’s a cumbersome approach that is hard to imagine prevailing.
So, we’re not sure what will happen for people watching the Tomsk Schumann quite frankly. You can follow their decision to do this in their news posts on their site, http://sosrff.tsu.ru/ We also have a link to their site from within the App at the top of the Resources tab.
For now, our recommendation is for everyone to turn as much as possible to using the Cumiana stations’s charts, or Hungary’s, for the Schumann. Cumiana are already in the App as you may know, and there’s a link to Hungary in the Resources. They’re more reputable stations actually, and their data is not inferior in any way. For whatever reason people gravitated to the Tomsk charts, but they needn’t.
So, that’s the drama in a nutshell. Feel free to write anytime.