2017-12-18, 09:55
(2017-12-18, 09:15)kriu Wrote: My "record" for H-field antennas is 11,000km. I live in Poland and the discharges received eg from Brazil and southern Africa.
But it was once like that - now I have set much smaller gain and range reaches max. up to 5000km - and this is how it should be.
We are moving away from long-range detection because it does not make sense.
Now we are moving towards smaller gains and greater efficiency.
My E antenna is 100mm long and regularly receives over 8,000km - the furthest so far is 10,513.8km. I live in Australia and those very distant signals came from Japan, India and off the coast of South Africa. I am a Amateur Radio operator and find it challenging and interesting to receive radio signals of any type from a distance - from the 1Ghz ADS-B aircraft signals I pickup from my FlightRadar24 receiver to the vlf lightning signals, making/modifying/improving antenna and the equipment makes it interesting for me. The "tuning" I have done with my blitzortung system to pickup very distant signals has also improved my ability to receive more local signals - my stats show I'm picking up over 82% of all lightning events across the continents of Australia and New Zealand. My magnetic antenna are 2 x 200mm ferrite rods and it took a lot of trial and error to find a position for them and to align them properly to reduce the effects of an electric fence on a rural property that adjoins mine. The electric fence increases the signals I receive due to the arcing and reduces my "efficiency", particularly in windy weather which causes a lot more sparks on the fence due to vegetation brushing the fence. If I wound back the gains to avoid these sparks, it would reduce the effectiveness of the Oceania region since Australia/New Zealand is an enormous area with only a fraction of the blitzortung receivers installed in USA and Europe - we need as many receivers as possible with the ability to receive long distances until our installed blitzortung population increases dramatically. I see you are in Africa with the same reduced population of installed receivers, so your efforts to improve your reception is exactly what I would be doing as well. My E antenna receives the majority of my distant strikes as I have it's gain set relatively high at 16 x 10 with noise adaption enabled - it normally operates at 10 x 10 with 60mv threshold. In comparison, my H antenna are 5 x 2 with one having 90mv threshold and the other which is more parallel with the electric fence set at 110mv - this is in full manual mode with no noise adaption.