Hey, so I came upon http://www.lightningmaps.org while browsing reddit today and I'm interested in setting up a station in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

I just moved to a new apartment (still moving in) that would make an excellent location (west Winnipeg, west facing balacony) for a station. https://www.instagram.com/p/BWP6zkXF4KC/...by=ristake
I'm on the top floor and the building is wood, new construction. The only nearby metal would be the balcony railing which would be the ideal mounting point for it due to the small space. 

This location often sees the heaviest rain in the city. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/w...-1.1329480
If I remember correctly, that neighbourhood got hit with 80mm of rain in an hour or two. Sadly I was still living with my parents in the south-east. I had set up in the garage with some chairs and a beer I was anticipating a good storm to watch and got a light drizzle! 

I wasn't able to find a tutorial laying out what is required to volunteer to operate a station so I have few questions before I pull the trigger.

Questions:

1. Time commitment: set up and continued operation
2. Initial and upkeep costs for a station 
3. Other equipment required?  


I haven't done any soldering or programming since high school so it's been nearly a decade however I am fascinated by thunderstorms and severe weather in general and learning new things is always fun. If this hobby pans out I'd eventually want to set up an HD camera to record/stream thunderstorms rolling in

Kevin

Hi Members,

I'm new and want to find out if there is any experience with export regulations. I'm thinking about building up a system and shipping it afterwards to friends in India that are doing hard to assemble a divice but would be able to operate it. Is it possible to export a device e.g. to india easily? Are the parts or the complete product "safe" or will it be treated as a critical device and blocked at the customs?

Any info is appreciated.

Michael

Hi All,

New Station installation completed a few hours ago & looking forward to feedback.

E-Field went in yesterday, about 150mm from memory.

First attempt at making a H-Field was completed a couple of hours ago.

To get started I make a 4 turn Moebius Loop with RG6 Coax.
It's just hanging in the outdoor area ATM & plan to re-site everything later in the week.
Right now the GPS is  shaded by a double iron roof.

Don't mind the idea of building another, better H-Field, but at least it's going now.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.


Thanks

Phil.

             

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?