Hardware Installation of Lightning Locating System Using Time Difference of Arrival Method

Lightning locating system (LLS) is employed to detect lightning occurrences in single station or multi-station systems. There is a variety of lightning locating systems based on the detection of propagated electromagnetic signals of lightning discharge. A parallel plate antenna is used to receive the vertical components of the electric field. The antenna is connected to a buffer circuit by a coaxial cable. The buffer circuit acts as a filter, an over voltage protector, and an impedance matching. A Global Positioning System (GPS) is also installed to capture the time stamps of received signals in sub nano-second precision. Each station is made up of hardware and software implementations. The hardware component of each station consists of a parallel plate antenna which is selected because of its ability of detecting the vertical component of the lightning electric field in a wide range of frequencies. A Matlab program is written to solve the non-linear equations for the lightning locating system based on the detected arrival times using measuring stations. Several lightning measuring stations will be designed, constructed and installed. This study investigates the hardware design, testing and installation of the stations.