Amateur lightning detector and radar. Low cost, less than 150 Euro, long distance. more than 2000 km. Easy to build at home. PC based, uses sound card as input. Download free and unlimited demo version.

Contents of web site :
1. Lightning radar principle
2. Antenna and amplifier
3. Direction and strength display
4. Direction history display
5. Discharge location display
6. Software downloads: Demo version, Map generation, *.bmp to *.jpg *.png conversion, FTP
7. Manual and documentation

Lightning radar Current activity

Download new free demo version V8.6.22 now !

History over 24 hours. Direction modulo 180 and strength 0, -99 dB

Synchronization between local and remote station.

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Lightning radar
Home brew, low cost, long distance

Lightning detector system with
2 crossed loop antenna's tuned to 10 kHz
two simple opAmp amplifiers with gain of 100 x
a connection to the sound card of a 1 GHz PC
and sound card sampling software 22 kHz sampling rate
a Visual Basic program that detects the direction
to the source of the lightning strike
with an accuracy of 1 degree.
This program can be used at different sites to calculate
the location of the lightning strike
using a trangulation method.

mailto:fkooiman@home.nl

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Below :
Picture of the 2 crossed loop antenna's.
Click on image for details.

Below :
Two channel opAmp amplifiers.
Click on images for details. Documentation OP27

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Below :

The diagram plots the direction towards the lightning discharge and its strength.
The direction is recorded modulo 180 degr.
The strength is recorded between 0 dB and -99 dB.

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Below :
Horizontal axis is the time of day 0:00:00 at the left 23:55:59 at the right.
Vertical axis is the direction towards the lightning discharge.
At the top is true north 0 degr. and at the bottom is south, 180 degr.
The color of the dots indicate the signal strength. Dark red is -50 dB light blue is -30 dB

Strong lightning is displayed as blue dots,
weak lightning strikes appear as dark red dots.
The bigger the distance, the weaker the recordings.
Lightning strikes occur in groups in place and time, as can be expected.
Some groups of lightning strikes are almost stationary,
other groups have a large angular velocity which could indicate smaller distance.

Because of the excellent sensitivity of the detector, lightning discharges are recorded every minute of the day and over great distances. It is not uncommon to detect lightning over Marocco and
the Uraine. Lightning discharge signals travel farther over water than over land that is why lightning can be seen before the coast of Florida but not south of the Sahara.

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Below :
When the same lightning strike has been observed from two or more sites,
a tringulation method can determine the location.

Correlation of the observations from two different sites is done automatically up to 1 mSec.
This is where the real knowledge of this detection system has been embedded.
A sophisticated clock synchronisation algorithm has been developed
A procedure that doesn't need user intervention at startup.

Contact: mailto:fkooiman@home.nl

Partner ground station:

· http://users.edpnet.be/DanielV37/Detecteur3/

Download Lightning Radar software:

· http:Setup.zip Should be installed first.

· (new) upgrade:Lightning Radar.zip

· Unzipped exe file can overwrite old version.

· Alarm function: Alarm.zip

Utillity software:

Conversion BMP to JPG or PNG:

· http://members.home.nl/fkooiman/lightning/Bmp2Jpg

· http://members.home.nl/fkooiman/lightning/Bmp2Png