Hi.
I absolutely love your site and what you are doing. It provides useful statistics and information to whoever needs them.

I have one question. Is it at all possible to know the elevation of the lightning impacts? I can use the satellite map to infer whether the impact has hit ~ sea level or a hill but I have no way of estimating the height of the impact point. Is there a way you could calculate this or even estimate (with reasonable accuracy) from the topography of the map?

EDIT: Nevermind, I just found out that if you zoom in enough and switch to ''map'' and enable terrain, you see contour lines.

I have my System Blue online. Station 1745. 

What is an acceptable noise floor value? 

The antenna is about 2m above the floor near the west wall of a room in my house. Basically it's laying on a chest of drawers. Is that going to cause reception issues? This, of course, is temporary.

I mentioned that I had one screwup in a previous post. I unchecked DHCP and didn't pay attention to (or set) the IP address that Blue defaults to. It's easy to recover from such a mistake

Using Wire Shark I was able to recover the IP and set it to something my network would like in less than 5 minutes. This is how I did it-

Assuming Wire Shark is already installed

(1) Connect the computer LAN port directly to the LAN port on the Blue with a Cat 5 cable. Do not use a switch. Connect port to port so that there is no other network traffic.

(2) Start Wire Shark. Make sure you tell it to use the LAN port

(3) BTW- You'll need to know what your laptop IP address is. If you don't know how to find that then this process probably isn't going to work.

(4) Watch the packets scrolling thru and look for an IP address that isn't your laptops IP address. Write that down. 

(5) As an example, if your laptop is 192.168.17.100 and you see 192.168.1.233 then your Blue is on the .233 address. Write it down. To connect to Blue you have to change your laptop to something in the same subnet. So...

(6) Shut Wire Shark down (and give it a hug for being so good). Change your laptop IP to 192.168.1. something other than 233. .200 would be fine. 

(7) Open a browser, put 192.168.1.233 in the address and rejoice when the Blue config screen pops up 

Pretty easy...

I finished my System Blue this evening. We had a big storm roll through TX last night and this morning. It's now in Louisiana and even though my H-field amp and antenna were literally only a meter above my workbench and connected to about 15 meters of 75 ohm coax I was able to receive some strikes. I took the system offline since it's not ready for prime time but I'm very happy with it so far.

Quick review:

Build quality: Outstanding
Ease of building: Very Easy (if you are experienced with soldering)
Interface: Very nice. Updating the firmware, looking through the settings and values, etc... all easy
Overall fit, finish, etc of the case: Very nice. Everything went together perfectly.

Mistakes made 

Only one dumb one that was easy to recover from. I unchecked DHCP but DID NOT write down the IP address. When I unchecked DHCP the address went to a default value and I didn't know how to reconnect. I'll make another post about how to recover your IP address using Wire Shark

I know the switch has to be connected to jumper 5 and 6 but I also see two thru-hole connections, labeled power, that appear to connect to pins 5 and 6. Is that an optional location to connect the switch?

Is the only power source the USB connection?

I've just started building my system Blue and I see there are 8 locations for SMA connectors. I was wondering what type (right angle or straight) other users are installing? I  have the (very nice) enclosure. Is it normal to route cables outside if the enclosure to rear mounted SMA connectors or are the SMA connection points just for testing?

Hello everyone,

I have a new BLUE system which I built last weekend. It works great some of the time. I can detect strokes that are over 1500-2000km away easily, and have a good stroke ratio when it works.

However, I have a noise problem (on H-field antennas, mostly E-W loop) that starts in the evening and runs through most of the night into the day. It puts my unit into interference mode. Even if I turn down the gain it does not help because  the spikes are so large. It's like someone turned on a switch or piece of equipment that starts the problem. I think the noise might be close by because I can see it on the E-field antenna too, but I could be wrong about that.

I'm looking for help in finding some posts here in the forum, or at other websites, on recommendations to start tracking down the location of this noise, and decide what nexts actions I should take.

Please see the attached images form the signal page, and other setup data. I can provide other information too if that will help.

I don't mind doing the work and learning new things, I just need a little help getting going. The information to help me might already be out there, but I'm not sure where to look.

Thank you for your time and your help!

Configuration:

• Manual mode
  
• 120mV threshold
  

• H-field (Two 100cm loops at 90º)
  
•   Gain: 16 x 8
  
•   Noise: 15-25mVpp
  
• E-field
  
•   Gain: 10 x 4
  
•   Noise: 39mVpp
  

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
           

I have a new blue station that I put together and installed this past weekend. I'm using two 100cm loops (H-field).

I've played with the settings in the unit, and now that I figured out it needs to be in manual mode and to set 'HP off' on the H-field, it seems to be working well.

Questions:

1) How do I know my station is working well from the perspective of the network.

2) Should I be trying to achieve a high stroke ratio? location ratio?

3) What values of the ratios are generally accepted as "a good working station"?

Thank you for your time and help.

Since upgrading to Firefox >= 52.0 on Linux sound has stopped working for me on the Blitzortung.org real time lightning maps.

Prior to 52.0 sound worked fine but for the new version I had to install PulseAudio.  On Linux, versions of Firefox before 52.0 used the ALSA sound system and 52.0 and later will only use PulseAudio which is a higher level abstraction above ALSA.  The result was that sound is working in FF in all other respects e.g.  videos, streaming radio stations etc. but not on the BO real time maps.  Very occasionally maybe one time in a 100 or more the click sound is heard for a detected stroke.  On this same machine (running a mutant version of Slackware 14.1) I have tried Palemoon browser and Chromium.  In both cases the sound works normally on the maps.

I am currently using FF 53.0b4 and as I don't like PulseAudio I've uninstalled it and installed the Apulse (https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse) PulseAudio emulator with exactly the same result as above.

From what I can tell the problem seems to be with how the BO maps script interacts with FF for audio.

Хочу участвовать в проекте. Буду рад любой помощи по данному проекту, спасибо!