I've been having problems with my red amplifier recently. Symptoms are working fine then all of a sudden lights on controller dim and power drops on powered usb hub. Same symptoms when powered from PC usb port and similar behavior when powered off a battery.

When unplugging the amplifier it comes back to life. I can see similar behavior if I unplug from controller and power via mini usb port so reasonably sure its the amp. I have used a different power cable and LAN cable as part of troubleshooting

I've checked all solder joints and they are all good. There was no water ingress in the box it was mounted in. I thought it might be have been the electrolytic capacitors so replaced all 4 of them but still not solved.

I've noticed on the webpage it comes up with:
No or unknown amplifier connected

In the amplifier section it shows

PCB 12.3 FW 1.7

and I can see it disappear , reappear then drop the gain in steps as adc voltage too high, settled and then disappear.

At a loss what to try next.


log looks like this...

Hi,
my name is Claudio, I'm an Amateur Radio, I have wrote several software / web sites for the ham community.

I would like to write a Telegram Bot that alerts the user in case of thunderstorm approach.

What do you think about my idea?


Claudio - IW1QLH

Maybe just me, but I thought this was interesting. Had a relatively close stroke - 33 km - and the waveform seems to indicate the it's one of those strikes that if you were to look at it, pulses, and maybe is brighter after the initial flash. Posted below is the waveform from my station as well as that from the Asheville station a couple hundred miles west of me.

It leaves me curious as to what the timestamp - -319us for mine and +26us for Asheville - for the same stroke really means. It appears that the waveform on both stations represents current for what's likely the same stroke. I wonder if the timing for when and subsequentlly "where" is based on a different "flow" interval for the same stroke. The -319 seems to be the fourth current flow interval, and while on Asheville, you cannot see the "first" - probably the leader - you can see flows two, three and four - four - the bigger one - seems to be what both stations actually triggered on.

Also, mine is a Red, and Asheville is Blue. The waveforms have many similarities.


[attachment=2770]
[attachment=2771]

I am new to the project having just completed assembling the Blue system.  I'm currently using ferrite antennas and still looking for optimal placement of it.  I have found that it works well in my attic and would like to leave it there for now.  I have built a PVC pipe enclosure for the ferrite antennas and pre-amp.  Pre-amp is, of course, connected to the blue controller in my home office via Cat6 cable.

My concern is the attic heat build up in the summer and the well being of the pre-amp in such heat.  Does anyone have any experience or knowledge of the long term ability of the pre-amp to function properly and survive in a hot attic?  I'm going to guess the attic will get to 120-140 F in mid summer.

Any advice appreciated.

stu

Hi,

I have just got my system blue (PCB 19.3b) powered up (I'm using a genuine Samsung phone charger capable of about 2 amp output) and I can't seem to access the web interface...
The lights come on as expected and I am using 'Advanced IP Scanner' to find the IP address, which it does all ok, but when I put that IP address into Internet Explorer, the website never appears.

Any ideas?

[edit]
Hmm, it seems my phone can bring the webpage up, but my computer cannot. Both in Firefox or Internet Explorer. I'll have to dig deeper into my computer...

[edit 2]
Reinstalled Windows (it was about time anyway) and it's now all working perfectly.
Not to work on lowering my noise floor...

Hi,I get this Google Maps error message : "This page didn't load Google Maps correctly. See the JavaScript console for technical details." On a Google Chrome Console I get this error message: "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'getNorthEast' of undefined" or "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'getBounded' of undefined". I've try with Google Key API credentials after 5 minutes,but not working! How to fix it?

Update: On Google Chrome not working,but on Firefox working!

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
   

Hi.
I absolutely love your site and what you are doing. It provides useful statistics and information to whoever needs them.

I have one question. Is it at all possible to know the elevation of the lightning impacts? I can use the satellite map to infer whether the impact has hit ~ sea level or a hill but I have no way of estimating the height of the impact point. Is there a way you could calculate this or even estimate (with reasonable accuracy) from the topography of the map?

EDIT: Nevermind, I just found out that if you zoom in enough and switch to ''map'' and enable terrain, you see contour lines.

I have my System Blue online. Station 1745. 

What is an acceptable noise floor value? 

The antenna is about 2m above the floor near the west wall of a room in my house. Basically it's laying on a chest of drawers. Is that going to cause reception issues? This, of course, is temporary.

I mentioned that I had one screwup in a previous post. I unchecked DHCP and didn't pay attention to (or set) the IP address that Blue defaults to. It's easy to recover from such a mistake

Using Wire Shark I was able to recover the IP and set it to something my network would like in less than 5 minutes. This is how I did it-

Assuming Wire Shark is already installed

(1) Connect the computer LAN port directly to the LAN port on the Blue with a Cat 5 cable. Do not use a switch. Connect port to port so that there is no other network traffic.

(2) Start Wire Shark. Make sure you tell it to use the LAN port

(3) BTW- You'll need to know what your laptop IP address is. If you don't know how to find that then this process probably isn't going to work.

(4) Watch the packets scrolling thru and look for an IP address that isn't your laptops IP address. Write that down. 

(5) As an example, if your laptop is 192.168.17.100 and you see 192.168.1.233 then your Blue is on the .233 address. Write it down. To connect to Blue you have to change your laptop to something in the same subnet. So...

(6) Shut Wire Shark down (and give it a hug for being so good). Change your laptop IP to 192.168.1. something other than 233. .200 would be fine. 

(7) Open a browser, put 192.168.1.233 in the address and rejoice when the Blue config screen pops up 

Pretty easy...

I finished my System Blue this evening. We had a big storm roll through TX last night and this morning. It's now in Louisiana and even though my H-field amp and antenna were literally only a meter above my workbench and connected to about 15 meters of 75 ohm coax I was able to receive some strikes. I took the system offline since it's not ready for prime time but I'm very happy with it so far.

Quick review:

Build quality: Outstanding
Ease of building: Very Easy (if you are experienced with soldering)
Interface: Very nice. Updating the firmware, looking through the settings and values, etc... all easy
Overall fit, finish, etc of the case: Very nice. Everything went together perfectly.

Mistakes made 

Only one dumb one that was easy to recover from. I unchecked DHCP but DID NOT write down the IP address. When I unchecked DHCP the address went to a default value and I didn't know how to reconnect. I'll make another post about how to recover your IP address using Wire Shark