below is an edited chat with Tõnu, who first draw my attention to blitzortung.org lighting tracker, the project uses GPS location and timing coupled with radio antennas to detect faint lighting signals from up to 5000Km and calculate the location by triangulation.
station=2003 is our sister station in cypress, maintained by Tõnu
we are station=2075
we are looking for more volnteers to maintaing nodes anywhere inthe middle east. we are severly underrepresnted and that hurts the accurasy of the lighting netwrok.
what you need to provide
- a few Kb of stable internet
- a GPS antenna (with view of sky).
- Maintainer mentality
I do run dozens of trackers on my own and now hardware building of whole project came to me. Receivers were not available for years and now I have small batch on my table and can decide who gets them. We have nobody in Israel and in current situation probably nobody has time for it. When times improve, I see your receiver also can be improved. I gathered lot of know-how over the years and can help. One thing what I think you need is LTC1569 chips for filtering. If you provide your address, I can try to ship then for you. For free. Whenever you get time, solder them on board and put filter to 40kHz unless you can eliminate noise source around 45kHz which makes station half deaf. Most probably power supply or some air conditioner nearby antennas.In this sense we are similar. Just doing what I can for community. I do not get paid etc.
There is a thing need to be understood - this network uses similar Time of Flight method like GPS does. To detect lightning, detectors to be on all different sides away from lightning. Detectors in Israel would be very useful to detect lightnings in Cyprus, Türkiye, North Africa, countries all around Israel. Israel also benefits but mostly countries around. More we have, more results we get, more accurate there will be.
I include screenshot I just made to show the issue. You see lightning next to Cyprus is received by many stations in Europe and one in Cyprus. If station on Cyprus would not detect, lightning would be completely missed. Same reason as with GPS, it does not work if satellites are only in one sector of sky. Your station is potential another receiver but usually misses it. Having more stations in region would improve whole network drastically. Countries in middle east tend to be not wealthy and low tech. At least this is what I assume.
Over time I learned to improve my systems. One of my best stations you can see here https://map.blitzortung.org/statistic_0.php?station=2003®ion=1 You can compare to your https://map.blitzortung.org/statistic_0.php?station=2075®ion=1
You can see your station has some peak on 46kHz. This is aggressive noise. That why I proposed I send filter chips to you at my expense. You can suppress anything above 40khz and by doing this gain more sensitivity.
On those statistics focus on orange line. This is ratio in % of how many signals sent to server made any sense at all. In case of noise, your ratio is low. Good stations tend have orange next to ceiling most of time. I do not think you have freedom to find better spot with less noise.
Just in case - this is link where I made screenshot from https://map.blitzortung.org/#5.86/35.528/31.176 Tõnu - email chat
2003 vs 2075 , filtering matters
mail regarding the LTC1569
tel aviv makers (TAMI) shoken 19 a Tel Aviv 6653205 ISRAEL
