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[Weaver]

Our lightning warning hardware device SkyScan failed on us, again, it failed to bleep! but its lights flashed - we saw a flash of lightning !

However, Sykscan 0 Blitzortunglive 1 - we had several distant-strike warnings from the Blitzortunglive ios app which squealed an alarm on the ipad. For some reason the strikes are not showing up in the map view on the app, maybe there's a time delay in updating.

Web: The lightningmaps.org map showed strikes on the island but there was a big delay I think.

[broadstairs]

I have watched Blitzortung live on the web before when we have been in the middle of a storm and can see the strikes within a few seconds of seeing the strike out of the window. I believe the way it works it needs reports from several reporters to first confirm its real and then to work out the position so if your area is quite a long way from the nearest reporting station and maybe only a few strikes I guess it could miss some or at least there could be a delay.

Stuart

[sevenlayermuddle]

Lightning maps is pretty much real time around here.  I can see a strike several miles away, watch the circle radiating out from it, and then listen to the rumble as it passes my home.  Within a second or two, it works.

My understanding was that they triangulated data from stations to provide real time maps.  Obviously, they need enough stations, with consistent data, for that to work.

But if (is it so?) these stations are mainly being run by volunteers, then local accuracy may depend upon local population density of willing computer Geeks.  I would hazard a guess that there is a higher density of willing Geeks where I live, vs Weaver.   Broadstairs too, the place if not the member (which may be the same).   Could that be why we see ultra high accuracy, but Weaver does not?

[Weaver]

There just are not enough stations for these parts, the few in Ireland, Dundee and plenty in Norway. But that geometry isn't the best for triangulation even. It's all done by timing comparison. There's a complete list of geeks on the blitzortung website.

I just would love one of the units,  it I have no idea what the part list's costs would come to. And I can't do soldering in bed either as I would probably set the bed on fire.

I know a young gentleman with an electr(.*) engineering degree from Imperial but he is probably busy earning money somewhere.

Bug: I have realised now that there was a bad bug in the ios app. It had got itself into a real state, even relaunching it wouldn't make it display live strikes on the map unless they were in Australia, but the push alert messages continued ok, because they just came straight from the server and didn't rely on local intelligence being completely intact. When I finally realised that it was unlikely that the whole of europ and the middle east had all gone very quiet, I had to delete and reinstall the app to fix it, which even involved downloading it again. I’m assuming that this worked because I killed all the persistent state, deleted config files plus stored preferences any local databases - the lot. I told the developer, but I wasn't able to be of much help. The app was working fine on another ipad.