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Originally Posted by AlmostHandy
I've recently gotten back into prototyping electronics. I had forgotten how much fun it was.
Anyways, I was searching for a ham/scanner relevant system to construct, (looking mostly at amps and simple crystal receivers and such) and ran across several designs for Lightning Detectors. It seems like a cool concept, and was wondering if anyone has ever used one, either homemade or commercially built. What is your experience with it?
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I built a lightning detector using an AM radio as the detector. Tuned to the low end of the band, the noise from lightning discharges is fed into a cap. As the cap charges, the voltage is read by a LM3914N chip which is then translated to a series of LED's. The stronger and closer the storm, the more LED's that light up. I set it up with 3 green, 3 yellow and 3 red. Not exactly the most accurate, but you can see as a storm gets closer as the LED's really start flashing. Can keep it running even when the storm is overhead because there is no external antenna. I enclosed it in an old Heathkit clock case with the smoked faceplate. And it's all battery powered. Took hardly any time to build and parts were really cheap.