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Dave Goodsell - Honorable Mention (Apple Valley, California)
Lightning Plotting System and Radio Data Link
Downloads for this project:
All files and information © 2006 Dave Goodsell.
Project Description:
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Click on Image for a close-up
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When I hear thunder in the distance I head outside. I always count the seconds between the flash and the thunder, trying to figure if it is coming my way. Five seconds equals approximately one mile.
About a year ago, while I was enjoying one of our High Desert lightning spectacles, I had a sudden thought, why not build a lightning detector and plot the strokes on a computerized map. That way I would know exactly where they hit and if they were heading my way. So I immediately went to the internet and in ten minutes I found the "GP-1 Lightning Locator" designed by Prof. Shirer of Penn State University. They had complete plans on how to build, test and operate the GP-1.
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Click on Image for a close-up
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First I built a 30" x 30" crossed-loop, direction-finding antenna, made out of PVC pipe and installed in on my roof. Then I constructed a flat plate, polarity-sensing antenna and erected it in the side yard. The Penn State circuits did a lot of signal conditioning and timing prior to being digitized, but I figured that an SX could easily handle those functions and eliminate quite a few op amps and logic.
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Click on Image for a close-up
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The SX48/52 Proto Board on the left is an addition that I will explain later. The three signals from the antennas come in on the lower left of the breadboard and are filtered by 500 kHz low pass filters. Next they are digitized at one million samples per second by three MAX153 8-bit ADCs and stored in a 512K SRAM circulating memory. A block diagram of the breadboard is depicted on the left side of the System Block Diagram, labeled Base Station.
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