For as mysterious, fascinating, and beautiful as lightning is at a distance, it’s not exactly a peaceful phenomenon up close. Not many things are built to withstand millions of volts and tens to hundreds of thousands of amps. Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge amount of effort put into lightning protection systems for equipment and resources that need to be outside where thunderstorms sometimes happen. Although most of us won’t be building personal substations, church steeples, or city-scale water towers in our backyards, we might have a few radio antennas up in the air, so it’s a good idea to have some lightning protection and possibly an alert system like [Joe] built.
The start of this project came about when [Joe] noticed static on his crystal radio’s headset when there was a storm in the distance. When disconnecting the antenna in this situation, he also noticed sparks, and then thought that placing a neon lamp in the circuit would essentially allow those sparks to form in the lamp itself. The sparks only cause the neon to glow dimly, so a capacitor was added to allow the voltage to increase, making the sparks of light in the lamp more visible. These sparks are still quite dim, though, so two LEDs were added in series with opposite polarity, allowing one to detect negative charge and the other to detect positive.
With the LEDs installed in the circuit, it’s much more apparent when there are charged clouds around, and with the addition of an RF choke, [Joe] can use this circuit at the same time as his radio while also getting alerts about potential thunderstorm activity. This isn’t the only way to detect lightning strikes, though. There are plenty of other ways to get this job done, and we’ve even seen lightning detectors so sensitive that they can detect socks-on-carpet static discharges as well.
Thanks to [Charles] for the tip!
This articles is written by : Fady Askharoun Samy Askharoun
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