Trying to register with their network, purchase a detector, and integrate into HA.
The Blitzortung community forum has been down for over a week; there are no registration links on their main webpage, and emails to their primary address have gone unanswered.
It appears that their detector network is still online, but thats it. Do we have any HA Blitzortung users that can assist me in registering?
There wasn’t a whole lot of activity in the forums a few months ago when I last checked. I also get the feeling that the founders have been burned out with this project for several years now, and not interested in accepting help.
A forum account is not the same as a station/user account. The only way that you can create a station/user account is from a link in a current detector’s firmware…which is unique and tied to that specific station hardware. You can’t use it to create a second account.
When I signed up to get a station several years ago, the wait was 2-3 years. They apparently only order station kits in small batches, and there were over a thousand on the waiting list at that time. Also worth noting is that the station is only available in kit form, and anyone who makes it through the process to buy one has to solder all of the through-hole components to the PCB. I was a decent solderer all of my life, but the through-hole microUSB power connector was a real challenge that I needed to get super-thin solder to do.
Part of the whole station sign-up process is acknowledging that Blitzortung is a PRIVATE network (emphasis theirs), cannot be used for commercial purposes, etc.
With each station covering thousands of miles, most parts of the world are already saturated with stations and adding more probably just creates additional server load on the back-end systems with no added benefits. A few years ago when I last checked, South America was a little soft on stations and could probably use some more. A lot of North American stations are covering South America, and I know that mine in upstate New York has a really good view all the way down to Brazil and south of the equator in the northern hemisphere’s winter which is their summer.
As far as I know, the Blitzortung HA integration (and Blitzortung’s official iPhone app) do not require a user/password to install/use them.
Anyway, not trying to discourage you…just letting you know a realistic timeline for obtaining a station and getting a station/user account. This is not a project with a “buy it now” link and next-day delivery…
That is disappointing, but thanks for the update
I am an electronics tech with 40 years of experience building electronics. I could build the unit piece by piece. I have a huge stock of components, including 3 different SMB sizes. Even if i build it myself, its useless without the network registration.
The area I am located in doesn’t have a Blitzortung receiver in a 400km radius; this is disappointing as I reside in the center of the most active weather areas of Tornado Alley in Oklahoma. Real-Time lightning data is critical to safety in our area; I operate a 25 Meter amateur radio tower that needs to be switched offline during storms. Real-time data from this device, coupled with HA would provide accurate early warning. I have several residential lightning detectors such as Ecowitt, but they are very inaccurate; commercial-grade lightning detectors are extremely costly and can easily reach over $10,000.
I did notice that they updated their price list this month, but there is no way to order the equipment; very frustrating.
Can the HA Blitzortung integration be implemented without a local device? I could still benefit from other regional receivers, even though the lack of receivers in my area would lower the accuracy. The Ecowitt integration is better than nothing, but it lacks any Geolocation data to provide a heading for strikes, it only provides a timestamp and esitmated distance based on signal strength.
Yes you can use the integration without any devices for it, I have it installed to track lightning in my area when there is a storm and alert me when there is hits within 5km of my home when I am outside.
Absolutely.
GitHub - mrk-its/homeassistant-blitzortung: Custom Component for fetching lightning data from blitzortung.org · GitHub. Use HACS to install it.
A single Blitzortung receiver does nothing to detect lightning by itself, and has no local API. The system works by measuring time-of-flight from dozens of GPS-time-synchronized stations all over the world, and uses the radius overlaps to approximate the strike location. Adding more density to a specific region doesn’t help to improve local accuracy, and I suspect that all it does at this point is increase the load on the back-end servers that collate all of the station strike measurements and calculate their locations.
I just grabbed this screen capture from lightningmaps.org. Notice that the strike off the coast of the Carolinas in the Atlantic was detected/located by several stations in EUROPE, and the one on the west coast of Mexico was detected/located by stations in Europe and Canada:
The only thing that I use Blitzortung info for in HA is in an automation to turn the electronic dog door off when there’s lightning detected within 50 miles. Our OCD psycho dog runs outside and tries to bite the lightning whenever he hears thunder, and can make it to the dog door faster than we can run to stop him from going out. I’m using the HACS integration, and it does not require Blitzortung login credentials or even know that there’s a local station sitting on the same subnet as HA…
BO is alive and the forum is almost back. Just a little patience while it is coming back. There will be an announcement on it to explain and rest assured, the project isn’t going away. It is only the forum that has an issue and not the network as is that runs on complete separate servers around the globe. And all the hardware details are still online
Give it a few weeks to normalize since most is done and maintained by Egon, though the forum is being worked on by Tobias.
Thank you bidouilleur
The link provides information on the needed components, but there is no way to place an order with out communicating first with your team to determine availability and make payment.
I am ready to order now, but have not received a response from my email sent a week ago. I understand that your team is all volunteers, but just wanted to get confirmation that orders are still being accepted and how to pay. Is it true that there is a year long waiting list between ordering the kit and having my station activated? As mentioned we are in a severe weather area that has a huge coverage gap, no stations for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.
Thank you for the volunteer service and time you provide,
Brian, AA5H
This is very interesting from an engineering standpoint, thank you for the comprehensive technical reply.
As an amateur radio operator, can you fill in the details of the effective range of the receiver, I assume that the frequency band is VLF or lower, I am confused on how stations in Europe could directly detect lightning from that distance; the propagation time is fast enough, but the radiated signal requires either multiple ionospheric hops unless it’s ground wave, the resulting refractions and reflections from the hops could skew the accuracy of the signal.
That’s my theory anyways…….
The last person in the thread says that the program is still alive, and there may be a path to obtaining a receiver kit. I not only want to suck in data, I want to participate, I already host a National Weather Service MESONET station, so this little box is no problem at all.
If I can’t get the kit, my only alternative is to train an OCD early detection dog .
Thanks
Brian, AA5H
Thanks, got it installed via HACS. I can’t get it to work, but I probably have the yaml code mangled. Will give it another try.
Brian, AA5H
Thanks Rob, it appears that others have this working without the receiver. While I still want the receiver, it would be helpful to have visibility using a remote server data ingest API or whatever it uses.
Brian, AA5H
The station kits measure E-field and H-field electromagnetic waves. Well, at least they used to. The latest Blue kit seems to have removed the E-field and one of the three H-field receivers:
I suspect that they have some sort of fudge factor on the back-end servers, that can adjust the flight times depending on distance from each station that takes into account one or more sky wave hops. The back-end servers look at all of the stations reporting an individual strike, and I suspect select the dozen or so used to calculate the strike location based on either distance from the strike or how that station’s circle correlates with all of the others. If you spend a few minutes poking around the public stations data page, you can see the live hourly stats for every Blitzortung station (and search them to see that there are currently ZERO active stations in Oklahoma):
https://www.blitzortung.org/en/station_list.php
The two important columns are “Involved” and “Used” on these lists. Involved means that it was credited with detecting a strike, whereas Used means that it was one of the stations that was actually used to pinpoint that strike. If you look at the “North America 2” region, each of the top stations appears to only be used for about 50% of its detected strikes. My interpretation is that the station density on our continent is more than enough for the network to function.
On the few occasions in the past that I went through the old lightningmaps.com server to see what my station was reporting, I noticed that it was used for a few strikes in New Zealand (13,500 Km away), the Cook Islands, Greece, the Mediterranean Sea, and north Africa including Mali. Not bad for two 200mm ferrite rods in some PVC tubing that sits on the corner of our deck railing:
I took my station down three weeks ago, because I’m in the process of relocating my QTH from the land of 2’s to the land of 4’s. When it was online, it was frequently on the first page in the world on that station list above…and sometimes #1 at the top.
One thing that’s interesting for hams is that Blitzortung encourages you to tinker with antenna designs, build magnetic loops, and other fun stuff. The kit doesn’t even come with antennas by default, unless you buy their 200mm ferrites made by a third-party and fashion a housing for them like my hack above…
