2014-08-10, 11:16
(2014-08-10, 10:20)piotreeek Wrote: Thank you for your reply,
I wanted to bulits this circut as it allows to control the gain and it would be possible to fine-tune it to detectr strikes in, let's say, 50km-radius. However, now you gave me second thoughts and I'll reconsider joining the network
Detecting lightning within a certain radius of a location, with a single receiver, is almost impossible.
Lightning strikes are of various intensities. Some are small, (relatively) low current discharges, others are massive discharges which produce very powerful radio frequency signals.
How a single point station can possibly discriminate between the two eludes me. It clealy also eludes a great many other technical minds!
The only two ways I know of require a significant number of stations operating co-operatively.
Method 1 requires each station to use two antennas and to produce a direction and time. Somewhere, these directions (and time signatures) are merged to determine where the strike was.
Method 2 requires each station to precisely time-stamp the signal, and a co-operative system that analyses the signals to work out where the source must have been to satisfy all the measured signals.
Method 2 is what Blitzortung uses - a "Time-of-Arival" (TOR) system. It is simple in concept but complex in implementation and requires a significant investment in hardware and processing power.
A simple receiver plus threshold detector may tell you that there is lightning "somewhere within the receiving area", that area may be several thousand miles, and without discrimination, will almost certainly count every electrical circuit opening or closing, every arcing contact, every breaking down insulator, withing a great distance from your (single) receiver.