TwinHollies Weather Center
Personal Weather Station Images and misc. Twin Hollies can be accessed at http://frankfortweather.us or its root folder at http://ourspecial.net/twinhollies/weathercenter/
Blitzortung Amplifier and 120mm ferrite antennas
The Blitzortung amplifier, with the 120mm ferrite core antennas. The yellow LEDs at the bottom would indicate 'gain' status, if running 'stand-alone' independent of the controller... in this case only the red power, and green Led are lit, indicating that the amp is subject to the microprocessor settings of the controller module in "The Cave". During it's testing and tuneup, the little ferrites and the amp confirmed strikes as far south as 10°N, as far north as 50°N+, and as far west as 106-107°. We have detected a few strikes out in the Atlantic around 70°W. Detection range is highly variable depending on conditions. We've built two large loop antennas, but they had so much gain, it was nearly impossible to test and check the system while fine tuning, and constructing. More on those later. Typically, the TwinHollies receiver will go into "interference mode" with strong storms having high activity within 250 miles. It stops sending data, but continues to record strikes... when a station is in "interference mode" other stations detect and report the strikes, so no events are undetected. And we have one neighbor's riding mower with bad spark-plug wiring that sends us down for a few minutes, about once a week while he mows his backyard.
UPDATE:
With the emergence of a few more stations, we now are able to register strikes consistently beyond the Pacific Coast, into the Northwest Territories of Canada, way past Bermuda, and consistently into South America. Not bad for teenie antennas!
