Hello Mike,
Glad to see a station between Austin and Houston as it will help cover the metro areas. I'm just up Hwy 71 in Austin where I've been testing out the three Oakhill stations for a few weeks.
Automatic mode doesn't seem to be much use. It seems to place receivers into interference mode too often which tends to cause lots of signals not to be sent. I've been keeping mine in manual mode where a gain of 8x5 seems to work well when I look at the statistics from the server online.
Note that when storms are within a hundred miles or so of your receiver then you will experience a lot of atmospheric interference. Don't expect your receiver to be used in locating strikes as this frontal system passes through today. You need other stations outside the hundred mile area around the storms to do the locating instead. Just let it ride it out; there is no need locating the stroke that hit the tree in the front yard - you will know! I noticed my receivers going into interference mode with their fixed gains when the lightning approached Fredericksburg both times this week.
Using a shielded ethernet cable from the H-preamp to the controller made significant improvement over my noise floor. It shouldn't matter if you use CAT-5 or CAT-6 cable; their impedance does not matter given our frequency range of interest.
I've since moved two receivers out to a shed away from houses and buildings where it is very quiet. Even with their fixed gain, I was receiving strikes ~2000 miles away (although only locating out to >1000 miles - but that is okay as there are better stations for those far-away strikes). The ferrite antennas are just laying on the bench with the pre-amp between them and 14 feet of shielded ethernet cable to the controllers. One system is inside the house still and seems to be performing just as well as the other two. Adding the shielded cable and moving the ferrite antennas away from the A/C power mains and breaker panel is all that I needed.
Regards,
Tim (AA5DF)
Glad to see a station between Austin and Houston as it will help cover the metro areas. I'm just up Hwy 71 in Austin where I've been testing out the three Oakhill stations for a few weeks.
Automatic mode doesn't seem to be much use. It seems to place receivers into interference mode too often which tends to cause lots of signals not to be sent. I've been keeping mine in manual mode where a gain of 8x5 seems to work well when I look at the statistics from the server online.
Note that when storms are within a hundred miles or so of your receiver then you will experience a lot of atmospheric interference. Don't expect your receiver to be used in locating strikes as this frontal system passes through today. You need other stations outside the hundred mile area around the storms to do the locating instead. Just let it ride it out; there is no need locating the stroke that hit the tree in the front yard - you will know! I noticed my receivers going into interference mode with their fixed gains when the lightning approached Fredericksburg both times this week.
Using a shielded ethernet cable from the H-preamp to the controller made significant improvement over my noise floor. It shouldn't matter if you use CAT-5 or CAT-6 cable; their impedance does not matter given our frequency range of interest.
I've since moved two receivers out to a shed away from houses and buildings where it is very quiet. Even with their fixed gain, I was receiving strikes ~2000 miles away (although only locating out to >1000 miles - but that is okay as there are better stations for those far-away strikes). The ferrite antennas are just laying on the bench with the pre-amp between them and 14 feet of shielded ethernet cable to the controllers. One system is inside the house still and seems to be performing just as well as the other two. Adding the shielded cable and moving the ferrite antennas away from the A/C power mains and breaker panel is all that I needed.
Regards,
Tim (AA5DF)