We are advised not to make our own ferrite antennas. How hard can it be? I ordered two of 20 cm manganese zinc ferrite rods from China at
$7 each. I gather that we should wind the core with one diameter spacing along the whole length for minimum inductance and maximum Q. The only missing information is wire gauge. Anyone have advise?

Peter from High River, Alberta, Canada

I would like to follow SunExpress's example and request a single review review for a new set-up.  All the Best Jonathan

Hello,

I am trying to reactivate an old Green PCB 6.8 USB, but i am having some troubles.

I have all connected well (i suppose), but when i connect the tracker ( PCB 6.8 V6), i get the RS232 green, the password verified and green also, but then, in the receiver, it stays Red and says No Data.

Could it be the GPS malfuction? Some Baud Rate problems? 

help me please!

Hi all,

I received my System Blue kit earlier this week and I assembled it today. However, upon supplying power to the unit I hear some repeating beeps from the buzzer and I cannot access the web interface. I tried re-flash the firmware using DfuSe and although the procedure went smoothly, the behaviour is still the same.

In the interest of clarity, I made a short video:

https://youtu.be/nS3QS4GNlYc

In the video the board was powered by my laptop and the network cable was connected directly to the laptop. As you can see in the video, trying to ping 192.168.1.235 (which I understand is the default when no DHCP server is available to issue an IP address) failed and the LAN connection briefly becomes active before showing "Network cable unplugged" again.

Any advice?

Thanks!

Bogdan

Hey,

I'm thinking about an Android app showing the live flashes on a map (like lightningmaps.org, but this site performs very slow at mobile devices). The only app I found shows average values per area, but no live view... so i decided to join the project (registered for interested in a device) and build an own android app showing live information. But i'm far down in the list, so is there any possibility to get live data without having a own station running at the moment? I need only "one" feed, the data distribution to the android devices would be managed from one of my servers to keep the load of the main network low.

Any ideas/proposals about that?

Best regards
Matthias

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?

Hi,

i have a system blue up and running and its connected to the internet.   
But when i enter its ip-address in MS Edge/Firefox/Internet explorer

I just get an empty page, it worked before (3months ago)

Nothing has been done at the station.
I can ping it, and its visible on my network, but i cant access the page.

Did i forgot something? You need to add a port?

Can anyone come up with an idea as to why I am not getting the map when using http://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en ?
I am also missing the small map in the left margin.

I am using Firefox 54.0.1 (64 bit) in a Win 8.1 laptop.    I have the Adblocker disabled on this site.

I am not aware of any problems with any other sites.

The maps work OK in IE and Comodo Dragon (a Firefox offshoot), neither of which I use with any regularity.

Greetings and I'm pleased to have a station 19.3 online and reporting data. It's still in setup and testing while I try to learn the behaviour of the system and the local noise.  I have 2 of 3 ferrites (stock models) attached in horizontal planar at 90 degrees (A & C with B disabled). On each of the ferrites one of the leads has a loop knot suggesting a polarity so I am wiring all the ferrites with respect to that polarity.  The E field channel is using the probe PCB antenna and is disabled due to large signal pulse every second. I suspect the local electric fence charger is responsible for that noise. I have installed the board into the aluminum case and have not wired up the external switch so power is applied with plug. The LEDs show some testing on power up and after about a minute or two the GPS LED begins to flash and signal LED with audio clicks can be heard. 

Plans : I will attach the third ferrite perpendicular to the planar to form a box xyz corner or Y configuration. I plan to remote this box and antennas about 1000 feet from the setup location and need to have a very stable system.

About me : I retired from hard drive R&D a couple of years ago where I designed testing methods for asperities on the disk surface. One of the problem areas is ESD so there are some sensors that attempt to measure voltage and H fields but the E field signal is small and H field signals are huge so seeing these signals from distant lightning strikes brings back those struggles.  I also built much of my test equipment and develop software (MATLAB) and python to make measurements. Now I am back  to NC where  I grew up and still want to measure stuff with Raspberry Pi and this blitzortung blue is interesting tool for LF noise analysis.

Issues : I do have a problem that I have searched for and either my search keys or the subject hasn't been discussed.  After I have made changes to the preamp settings (Normal/Disable/Don't send) the system will startup and run for about 5 minutes and then the buzzer goes on solid for a couple of seconds and the system http page freezes. The power, mode, network and fault LEDs are steady but GPS, alarm, and signal are off and the system seems to be locked up. Since it's in a case, the push button switches are not accessible so reset is done with power cable cycle.   After reset with power, the system operates for hours doesn't show any error messages on the debug screen.  I do see the local control changing the gains and some remote messages about overall gain of 6400 and thresholds of 100. Any suggestions from others experience would be helpful.

A big storm blew through here last night (and the barn opposite me was set alight as a result of a tree being hit by lightning). I wanted to see how close the network got to spotting this cloud-ground stroke.

I went to http://en.blitzortung.org/archive_data.p...w_result=1 and it gave me a choice of files to download. The CSV worked, but the OSM and the KML files did not seem useful -- it particular, the KML file was empty. 

From the CSV file, the stroke was reported at the right time and the offset was 4,500 ft.

I also wanted to see information about the stroke, so I did the following search:

https://www.lightningmaps.org/blitzortun...139&bo_get=

but, although it said that five strokes were found, I couldn't actually see them being plotted to click on them.