Hi from Las Cruces

[John in Las Cruces]

Hi from John in Las Cruces.
Yup! Newbie here, but not new to electronics. Since being on disability I decided to get back in to it a bit. My latest electronics education was at DeVry in 1991. And yes quite a few things have changed. I think I would like to try micro controllers. But for now I'm going to look around and see if y'all have any posts/circuits about simple lightning detectors...

 

[fourtytwo]

Welcome John
Try the chat too, nice bunch of people here, I have been here a few weeks too seen a bit of information about lightning detectors around on the web. I guess you may want to log information and process it so micro controllers can be handy for that too.....good luck

 

[John in Las Cruces]

Thank you fourtytwo!

 

[Ian Rogers]

You're in the right place for micro controllers... Tons of help to be had here..

Welcome..

 

[cowboybob]

Welcome to ETO, John!

... My latest electronics education was at DeVry in 1991. And yes quite a few things have changed. ...

They sure have...

But rest assured that there are members here with some deep (and some might say, pretty dated) experience going back many decades, as well as very current knowledge.
As for:

... circuits about simple lightning detectors...

came across this circuit after a simple google search of "aircraft lightning detector":

No idea if it works but the circuit design looks like to would.

 

[MikeMl]

...
No idea if it works but the circuit design looks like to would.

Cant possibly work as drawn. There is something missing between the Pulses" node and +5V...

This one looks more promising...

 

[spec]

The lightning detector circuit is designed to interface to another circuit which provides a path to 5V. If the other circuit is not used, a 1K resistor needs to be connected between 'Pulses' and 5V. http://www.techlib.com/electronics/lightning.html

spec

 

[JoeJester]

In the 1990s, I saw a lightning detector in an electronics magazine I bought when I was in New London CT for a couple of weeks. I did purchase it as it used both optical detection and rf detection.

On problem we had, and I discussed it with the designer, was the optical side detected lightning on sunny days. Well, the NASA scientist that designed it, mentioned the sun reflecting off the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere as the cause. I also told him that the next model should have some form of sensitivity adjustment and maybe the optical range should be looking up. We used it as an early warning for thunderstorms moving in from the west as we lived 40 minutes from the station. I ended up anding the rf and optic dry contacts to activate the alarm and then using a retriggerable monostable with a long time constant to keep it from counting EVERY ground strike and cloud to cloud strike.

Atmospheric noise, typically from lighting was about 60 dB/uV in the LF range, in my area of operation ... which included Las Cruces. We had a secondary station in the South Central U.S. Loran Chain at Las Cruces. When we first installed that detector, there were plenty of false alarms ... so I had a few productive calls with the designer.

Anyway, welcome aboard. Have fun.

 

[cowboybob]

... Cant possibly work as drawn. There is something missing between the Pulses" node and +5V... ...

You're right Mike. I made an assumption that the "Pulses" output had a pull-up. Other than that, not so different than your suggestion.