Expanding detection to nuclear events

[aigarius]

With grow of instability in local areas around the world and grow in technology and knowledge it slowly becomes more and more likely that non-government agents might use a nuclear device in one of the many hot spots around the world. Having an independent real-time source of information that would notify population of such events could provide huge benefits to survival of people.

Now, Blitzortung already has radio frequency monitoring stations and triangulation software with real-time output. Nuclear events produce a significant electromagnetic pulse. I am not an electrical engineer, but my guess is that such a pulse could theoretically be detectable with current Blitzortung hardware. If that is true, then it would only be a question of software changes and some kind of calibration data to add support for recognizing and displaying such information along with saving copies of raw signals for future law enforcement analysis.

I am pretty sure that this would require government cooperation to provide some information on the EM pulse profile of different nuclear events, but the public benefit might be a worthy enough cause to convince them to share the data, at least to some developers under appropriate NDAs.

[cutty]

If we did, or could, have that capability we sure wouldn't talk about it. That would only add more targets to missile guidance control and evil folks' road maps.
But we do pretty good at hobbyist lightning detection.