I have reciently received back from Falkland Islands (VP8) a system Blue. This system control box only shows a single red Led. The damage report suggested the PSU was damaged by a close proximity lighting strike. This appeared to have placed a very large voltage spike onto the PCB. There was no indication of a date when this strike happened. I'm not sure if this unit plus antennas ever really worked. I know there were local problems with linking to a computer for internet access particularly for long periods.

My real question is can this System Blue be returned for repair or at least a review.

Roger G0SWC 

Hello All;
I'm just new to Blitzortung but have been operating my own weather station for a few years now (enthusiast - data send to WOW Weather). As you may know Western Australia is a fairly large chunk of land (2.6 million sq Km), yet there are only 5 detectors in total, all located within a small area in and around the capital - Perth. I live about 1600kn north of the capital in a small town near Karratha (in the Pilbara). The north west of our state has some of the most active storm/lightening areas around - a weekend in February a few weeks back recorded some 2 million lightening strikes in the Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberly regions.
I have recently ordered a Blue system - and joined the 6000+ waiting list. Hopefully things will move alone fairly quickly as views from our porch on pretty much any given night in summer reminds me there is a hell of strike data that is just waiting to be captured!

Also just putting it out there to anyone else who lives in this region that is also interested in setting up a detector is these parts...please feel free to introduce yourself and have a chat!!

Regards
Smithy

Has anyone tried replacing the mini with a micro USB connector on the System Blue?  It looks like it should be a direct swap and micro USB cables, especially longer ones, are far easier to source than mini USB thanks to the Pi ecosystem.

Hi, 

A new thread regarding the topic of lightning physic. I found this article in wikipedia extremly interesting and I want to try it.... Franklin bells. Below some pictures of it:

   

   

   

The part a) consists in a kind of antenna totally isolated from the ground. I bought a metallic sphere in order to avoid any kind of corona discharge of the structure. The sphere is connected to the Franklins bell structure, more exactly on the left bell. 

On b) we can see that the left bell is very close to the right one and in-between there is a small metallic bead (piercing material) also isolated from the ground which can oscillate freely between the two bells. A pendulum so to speak. The right bell is connected to the ground.

During keraunic activity the antenna and de facto the bell is charged, the small bead (if initially connected to the antenna bell) will also be charged with the same polarity. At some points the charge is high enough so that the electrostatic forces repulse the small bead to the ground charged bell, and vice versa... The system is ringing.

I thought that this was not really efficiently working, the electrical storm of yesterday proved me that I was wrong.

   

Another evidence of this principlein this video Franklin's bell.

Do not hesitate to send me feedback if you want some more information or if you have questions. 

Looking forward to it.

Hi, 

I was looking for some hotspots in order to take pictures of lightnings (taking all possible security measure of course) and I could not find any good way of accessing to this information. 
I wrote a script in order to extract the CSV data and to stich them temporally and I reprocessed the data afterward into Mathematica. Doing so I managed to generate the attached pictures.

   
   

For those interested in local density plot. 
Below the script written in Python using the Selenium library. This script needs to be edited in order to perform your task, you need to define:

• The location of your chromedriver
  
• The download path
  
• Your login on Blitzortung
  
• Your password on Blitzortung
  
• The start date for the data collection
  
• The min/max latitude and longitude of the area of interest
  

Dear all, 

our no-profit organisation (www.sardegna-clima.it ) is very interested in installing a lightning station in centre Sardinia as the Western Mediterranean seems not very well covered.

I've already posted the interested on the relevant page but being "Italy" seems that we are not on a pretty well position...

I was wondering if there is any chance to get the equipment in a reasonable time.

Many thanks in advance.

Enrico 

www.sardegna-clima.it

It looks like lightning from the Jan 15, 4:15 UT volcanic eruption in Tonga are visible in archive data:
https://www.blitzortung.org/de/historica....php?map=0
However the timestamps seem to be one our late, i.e. 5:15 - 6:30. Perhaps the web interface is actually showing CET instead of UTC?

Regards from Nürnberg,
Markus

hey everyone - just wondering why lightning strikes around Townsville Queensland Australia are not showing up on your map..we are having a great storm atm with GC lightning strikes - is there a issue?? would like to be a server if needed...also why is NSW covered but no other state...hope someone can help me out

[b]What is the status of the websites & their servers/support?[/b]

https://www.blitzortung.org/en/forum.php

http://www.lightningmaps.org/blitzortung/america/

****I understand there was loss of data servers due to a fire and that the data servers were restored.

****There have been forum posts regarding new versions of hardware and firmware that have not come to fruition.

****Additional posts cite issues with website errors in which stations are listed in duplicate, triplicate

****Some stations are fully functional detecting lightning but are not contributing to "strikes" and are at 0%

Have the developers stopped maintenance/developing? 

An update from Tobias and colleagues will be greatly appreciated...

Thank you from Rochester, Minnesota, USA

https://tinyurl.com/sfwrffpm

My system blue is rebooting often, I know it see a lot of interference during the day due to solar systems around it, and initially thought that was the reason, however I have notice that it is rebooting during the night also. I have tried to use the system log to try and find a possible reason but I seem to be bombarded with remote-config errors (See the extract from the log below) and wondering if this is taking up too much processor time and tripping the watchdog?

Station 2353

Regards,
Bevan


2021-11-15 00:19:45 1034.5 | AMP2: Set gain 3 on channel 0, op-amp 0
2021-11-15 00:19:45 1034.6 | HTTP-Request: realloc RecvData 0x0 (745)
2021-11-15 00:19:45 1034.6 | HTTP-Request: realloc RecvData 0x20013190 (975)
2021-11-15 00:19:45 1034.6 | REMOTE-CONFIG: Done with 1 updates and 6 errors
2021-11-15 00:19:45 1034.6 | REMOTE-CONFIG: Too much errors!
2021-11-15 00:19:45 1034.6 | HTTP-Request: free state 0x20013ac8, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0
2021-11-15 00:19:46 1035.4 | REMOTE-CONFIG: Server switched to 1
2021-11-15 00:19:48 1037.5 | HTTP-Request: Malloc state 0x20013b88, 0x20013e20 (2121), 0x20013ba8 (21), 0x20013bc8 (44) | pcb 0x20010144
2021-11-15 00:19:49 1038.6 | HTTP-Request: realloc RecvData 0x0 (745)
2021-11-15 00:19:49 1038.6 | HTTP-Request: realloc RecvData 0x20013190 (825)
2021-11-15 00:19:49 1038.6 | REMOTE-CONFIG: Done with 1 updates and 6 errors
2021-11-15 00:19:49 1038.6 | REMOTE-CONFIG: Too much errors!
2021-11-15 00:19:49 1038.6 | HTTP-Request: free state 0x20013b88, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0
2021-11-15 00:19:50 1039.4 | REMOTE-CONFIG: Server switched to 0