I am new to Blitzortnung and we would like to build a small (5 nodes?) network in East Africa (Kenya, Uganda & Rwanda). We do this from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. It seems there are not too many stations in that part of the world. Would this be of interest to others as well?
Best - Nick van de Giesen
Hello Nick,
I think you should contact Egon Wanke directly regarding setting up an east African network. Only two considerations from my side: the minimum of stations required to register a valid stroke is 8 in Amerika and 11 in Europe. So 5 would be a bit on the low side. Since these stations would be quite some dístance from each other, you would probably go for coverage and detection efficiency and not for very accurate location of each stroke. In this case, using the system with the optional low-pass filters is useful. With them you can cut out all frequencies say above 25 kHz which are useless anyway for long-range detection, but you would loose a bit of location accuracy, as I learned from Egon.
It's simple really... acquire your Systems, Install them, Bring them online, and the Networking will all follow!
Blitzortung is to be a Global Network, though it is divided into Regions for server processing.
Go For It!
With the data available to Operators you can then proceed to pull out the stations that you choose to utilize for
your 'personal' observations....
Whether you need any filters or other options will be up to you... Blitzortung uses data from about 3 kHz up to approx. 300kHz. As you know most of the impulse energy centered around 13.5lHz ,,, you'd only need low pass filter options if you had a noise source causing 'interference' at a frequency that causes excessive signals, for example, or you wanted to focus on, say 3-30 kHz and weren't interested in the higher frequencies... if you wanted best data on nearer strikes ... 10 - 80km you'd want the higher frequencies. There is so much activity in cells <about 30kM that the system would likely go interference mode and stop sending... it's designed to do that normally, there is so much data it becomes useless, unless a system is operating with extremely low gains and very high thresholds, for example.... best data on impulses 30-80 km.
Some months ago there was a proposal to add stations to the different sites of the Square Kilometer Array South Africa (SKASA). Is this still planned? Then the coverage of Africa would be substantially improved, if also in east Africa a cluster of stations is added.