Blitzortung.org Forum

The Square Kilometer Array South Africa (SKASA) MeerKat engineering group is planning to have an array of blue stations hosted at sites in South Africa. The African Institute for Mathematical Studies in Capetown, South Africa is the first committed site. We will be discussing locations for additional sites, and technical details of the Blitzortung network in a meeting at the Pinelands, South Africa offices on Wednesday July  11th. A page describing the Square Kilometer Array is here:

https://www.ska.ac.za/

What is the right way to get technical information?  We have these sorts of questions:

What is the testing procedure for a newly constructed blue?
Does the blue serve a web page, and how is it seen?
How do we register new blue stations?
How do we provide IP addresses for the return lightning location solution data stream?
How do we indicate SKASA server IP addresses so we can program our own solution algorithms?
What are the data formats of the data streams?

Are there engineers among the participant community who would be willing to skype with us to answer these sorts of questions in real time?

(2017-07-09, 11:40)davidsaroff Wrote: [ -> ]1. What is the testing procedure for a newly constructed blue?
2. Does the blue serve a web page, and how is it seen?
3. How do we register new blue stations?
4. How do we provide IP addresses for the return lightning location solution data stream?
5. How do we indicate SKASA server IP addresses so we can program our own solution algorithms?
6. What are the data formats of the data streams?

7. Are there engineers among the participant community who would be willing to skype with us to answer these sorts of questions in real time?

1. Check if everything powers up and communication between the pre-amplifier boards and the controller.
2. Blue has a webserver that is available on the LAN.
3. On the firmware status page, there is a link to register a new user account.
4. Data is obtained throught http requests to blitzortung servers.
5. Lightning calculation is only done on blitzortung's servers, there is no alternative.
6. json

Blue also has GPS synced NTP server, which could be useful.

You may want to message Egon with your desires, his email is posted different places.

Once your Blue station is operational, on the Blue station's web interface there is link with details about registration of the system.

You might be able to use the lightning data from Blitzortung for post processing of SKASA data, but you would need to create your own solution.

There are rules about using Blitzortung data, make sure you are not going to break the rules.

http://en.blitzortung.org/contact.php

(2017-07-09, 20:34)kevinmcc Wrote: [ -> ]Blue also has GPS synced NTP server, which could be useful.

You may want to message Egon with your desires, his email is posted different places.

Once your Blue station is operational, on the Blue station's web interface there is link with details about registration of the system.

You might be able to use the lightning data from Blitzortung for post processing of SKASA data, but you would need to create your own solution.

There are rules about using Blitzortung data, make sure you are not going to break the rules.

http://en.blitzortung.org/contact.php

Kevin,

I'm in email contact with Egon. Your answers agree with his. His answers to technical questions are terse though. Are you involved in the software authoring for the blue or the servers? Who is? How did you come to know about the time server in the blue? Who is the go-to person who can answer technical questions in detail, who would have time for me and the engineering groups at the Green Bank radio telescope in WV, and the MeerKat radio telescope engineering group in South Africa?

I want to be clear that we will waste no one's time with beginner's questions, but I'm afraid that a bio comes off as an arrogance. I'm only trying to establish the technical level for a detailed conversation. Risking seeming arrogant:

I'm a retired Sillicon Valley engineer, at age 64 returned to graduate school for a PhD in Astrophysics after having designed logic chips at Fairchild, processor chips at AMD, ethernet bridges at Ungermann-Bass, and mobile scanning cellphone coverage diagnostic equipment for Southern Bell and others.

Academically I've completed all but my PhD thesis, and expect to graduate in a year or two. My thesis topic is a search for pulsars in the Andromeda/M31 galaxy using the Green Bank WV radio telescope, from which I've recorded 40 hours of signal into 8Tbytes of disk storage. I am now searching that data with C, Mathematica, and PYTHON programs.

I've designed FPGA and GPU back end equipment for the Green Bank radio telescope, to provide real time triggers on some interesting types of astronomical radio events.

I've built a blue station for the Green Bank telescope, now in testing and emitted RFI mitigation. I will build the first blue station for South Africa, to be sited at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Capetown as soon as Egon prioritizes the kit.

I'm working with the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope MeerKat engineering group to extend Blitzortung network coverage to South Africa, and north into sub Saharan Africa. Egon is encouraging this. We will be discussing site selection in a meeting tomorrow, Tuesday July 11th. What I have ready for that meeting is what can be seen in a google cloud drive directory at

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0...sp=sharing

This is light on the sort of technical detail we want.

Please help with technical detail, or explain how you came to be knowledgeable yourself, or point me to the go-to person who might help.

David Saroff, KM4DCQ
Charlottesville, VA
writing from Capetown, South Africa

If that URL didn't work, please try this one

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9qe1h...3FRVktBNFk

davidsaroff,
to me its not clear what you really want to do. If you just want to set up a network of Blue stations in Africa, there is no need to develop anything: the Blue board comes ready with firmware (which one should not touch anyway) and the data are sent to the server and are processed there with the existing (and very good) analysis program.
So there is no need to develop any hard- or software to participate and get the lightning location data of the whole network.
The only effort that is required is to get the systems working with as little noise as possible.
More work is required only when a new server has to be set up, but even in this case no development should be needed since the analyis software on all servers should be identical. So what are you really trying to do?

Any word on this project?

I offered a blue to the radio astronomy observatory in Green Bank, and they have declined it. I offered one to the MeerKat radio astronomy observatory in South Africa, went there, gave a presentation, and there has been no followup from them. I can privately fund 2 or 3 blues, but I can't make anyone host them, I can only offer. Blue 1916 is mine, near Charlottesville, VA USA.

My intent as a radio astronomer was to site blues on or near radio telescopes, and provide a script to querry the server for lightning activity that causes interference, to help with removing the sferic signals from our observational data. The radio receivers at the observatories are the most sensitive in the world, with electronics custom built and cooled to nearly absolute zero to reduce thermal noise. Lighting within thousands of miles saturates the receivers for tens of milliseconds. The blitzortung solutions would provide tags for those interference events, and allow the training of machine learning algorithms to do real time removal. All interesting stuff IMHO, but apparently not to Green Bank or MeerKat.

Having to get on with my work, looking for pulsars in the Andromeda galaxy
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1...slide=id.p
I shrug my shoulders, and move on. I had hoped to extend the blitzortung network into southern africa and south america, the toe holds being radio astronomy observatories and astronomy departments at the affiliated universities. There were nibbles, but no bites, even on the offer of free blues. Go figure.

That is sad to hear. Things here move a little slower than some other places when decisions need to be made.

I will have my blue soon (paid for it today) and was hoping for some more stations in this lonely neck of the lightning woods.

I have another location 250 km from where I will put up the first system. I hope that my budget will allow another station in the next year so we can get this area covered. The first location is close(-ish) to Sutherland.

Thanks for the effort though!