Whenever I see a flash of lightning, I always start counting seconds until I hear thunder, to estimate distance.
Is this common among the Blitzliebhaber or Blitzenangsthaber here at Blitzortung?

I can now do this a different way with Blitzortung maps. I am staying temporarily in an area that has thunderstorms every afternoon: this is common in mountainous areas with summer monsoon rain. I'm working inside, and I can't see lightning flashes, but when I hear thunder, I open the dynamic map at Blitzortung.org, center my position in it, and then zoom in as close as possible.

On another screen, I bring up google maps, and measure the distance from the center of the Blitzortung dynamic map to its edges. With this distance in mind, I start to watch the lightning map. 

When I see new lightning strikes on the map, I start counting seconds, starting with the instantaneous delay I see on the map, until I hear thunder, and very often the time/distance corresponds well with that closest lightning strike that triggered the counting. I can often hear approximate azimuth when the thunder arrives, as well.

Sometimes I have to stop counting seconds when the time/distance would place the lightning strike off of the Blitzortung map.

Perhaps half the time there is thunder but no Blitzortung strike. I suspect that these are often IC (Inter-Cloud) strikes, which Blitzortung does not locate (for more reasons other than just their non-vertical polarization).

       
As the subject: the menus on the right side of the web map can't be used on Firefox (142.0.1 64-bit). 

On mouse-over, the menus open, but they close as soon as the mouse leaves the menu icon.

Hello, station 3212 here.

Could I kindly have my status updated to 'participant'?

I have been tuning over the past few weeks, and think I have things mostly dialed in. Things appear stable, but will continue to play with things.

I think the question I have for the moment is why the website only shows one antenna input when I have confirmed that the station appears to be participating in stroke location with either of the inputs disabled at the amplifier. Both inputs appear to be functioning fine with regard to signal detection on the local interface, detecting strokes, and uploading to the server.

I have attempted to search the forum, for solutions, but perhaps I will be able to glean more info after user enablement, as some posts appear to not be readable by my account in the current state.

Any insight?

Kind thanks, and happy to be participating!

Hi everyone,
I’ve recently set up my Blitzortung station, and it seems to be working fine overall, but I keep noticing that my station often shows “too many pulses” and gets flagged with poor signal quality on the LightningMaps status page.
A few things I’m unsure about:

• Is this usually caused by incorrect antenna placement (too much local noise), or could it be a configuration issue in the controller?
  
• Would adjusting the gain settings help reduce the number of invalid pulses without missing actual strikes?
  
• Is there a recommended way to identify the main source of local interference?
  

Hello

I moved my station and on blitzortung everything looks right but not on lightningmaps, wrong info and location. Something i need to do?

The station in question is  2718

Just stumbled on this card to use in a Home Assistant page.  It can be installed via HACS or manually
This is the GIT page : https://github.com/timmaurice/lovelace-b...me-ov-file

It will show the detections of your station on a little map and some counts

Hi, i have brand new boards that i made few years ago. 
In stock:
PCB_10_5 - 5 pcs
PCB_13_1b - 5 pcs 
PCB_14_1b - 5 pcs
I think i can sell it for 20 EURO for 1 setup of boards with delivery cost (PCB_10_5 + PCB_13_1b + PCB_14_1b)
Please DM for more information because i'm located in Russia

Hello!
Are there any designs with inexpensive components, such as ESP32, GPS module, and some other modules from AliExpress? There is an SI4732 chip, a digital CMOS AM/FM/SW/LW/RDS radio receiver. Perhaps something else.
A device costing €200-300 is probably not “cheap” for many countries. This will not contribute to the development of the project.
By the way, the project website looks a little unfriendly or abandoned. I can't find the price for the “system mini” kit. The data looks scattered or incomplete, as if it was collected in a hurry. It's a cool global project, but it seems unfinished.

Hello folks.  I am a new member here (station 3205, US/Colorado/Summit-county).  I have been operating my station for just a few days.  There are lots of things I don't know, so I apologize if this is a dumb question.  I clicked around and found LightningMaps.org and logged in and clicked through America and Statistics and Network.  This brought me to Lightning Network Statistics for a period of one hour. The "Sum of strokes" was 5680 and the "Sum of Signals" was 445229.   I clicked on the "Efficiency" column header to sort it so that the most efficient station was listed first, working down to the least efficient station.  Here is a screen shot.
   

And now the first of two things that astonished me.  My station 3205 (US/Colorado/Summit-county) was ranked highest for "Efficiency"!?  My station was listed with a signals per hour count of 21740 and with a strokes per hour count of 2508.  And this yields an efficiency score of 22.6%.  And this was the highest-ranking station in the report.

How can it possibly be that my station, just a few days old, would be the highest ranking station in the report?

Maybe this is somehow tied to the fact that when I was logged in, it somehow focused on my station?  Maybe when a different person logs in, they see a different station showing up as most efficient?

Turning to the second of two things that astonished me.  There are about 158 active stations in the United States.   I am baffled to see that nearly all of the stations in the report have an efficiency of zero.  How can it possibly be that only about 6 of the stations in the US have a nonzero efficiency?

31 July 2025

"The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established a new world record for the longest lightning flash – an incredible 829 km (515 miles) in a notorious storm hotspot in the United States of America."

"The megaflash occurred in October 2017, during a major thunderstorm complex. It extended from eastern Texas to near Kansas City - equivalent to the distance between Paris and Venice in Europe."

The original article can be read here: https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-ce...record-usa

Enjoy!

Update:

Original publication introduction:

"Lightning is viewed as a localized hazard to the general public, with safety guidance implying
being close enough to the thunderstorm to hear or see lightning (Cooper, 2012). Lightning
“megaflashes” (Lyons et al. 2019) challenge this view as single continuous long horizontal
flashes that extend for hundreds of kilometers through the clouds, initiating up to hundreds of
Cloud-to-Ground (CG) strokes along their paths. Moreover, megaflashes occur in regions of
organized storm systems that might seem inactive with 30 minutes or longer passing between
flashes (Peterson and Stano 2021). They are also known to produce noteworthy effects –
including potentially damaging high peak current CG strokes with continuing current, and
dazzling sprites above the cloud-top."

PDF can be downloaded here:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journa...0037.1.xml