Lightning & Thunderstorms – 6 March 2020

Dieter, VK3FFB, presented a very interesting talk on his interest in the varied world of lightning, sharing his understanding of the phenominom and his lightning detector system and its usage recently at the EMDRC monthly Willis Room meeting.

The lightning radio pulse travels like any other radio wave over long distances and can be utilised to detect and locate the lightning location.

The lightningmaps.org system uses the TOA approach (time of arrival). The time of arrival together with other data is measured and reported by each participating detector to a central server for processing.

The main result of the processing is establishing the lightning location from all received TOA data from all stations that have detected the lightning at their known geographical location.

Thus, a relatively accurate and near realtime lightning map can be created and made available online.The SystemBlue receiver is a custom built device and available for around 300Eur. Deiter said he would love to see more people setting up a receiver and contributing to the community around the world – the more the better. It doesn’t matter if stations are relatively close as each contributes to richer data through variations in the reported signals. Dieter adds to his varied interests with photography which he shared with the group with some stunning lightning strike images.

For more information, Deiter has his site at Blitzortung.org and you could try  lightningmaps.org too.

I believe Christopher, VK3AML, will have a video of this presentation up on YouTube soon. Go to his video collection at YouTube via this link AusRadioHistorian where you will find a number of presentations and interesting videos.

73s

VK3PZ &

VK3TMP

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Thanks again Deiter for an excellent presentation.

If you have an interest you feel others would like to hear, give your committee a call. They’d love to hear your stories.

Regards Ed.