I run a hobby weather station as well as a seismic (earthquake) detection station. Since these are going on 24/7/365, I update our web pages automatically every 5-minutes. To see the almost-live data just refresh your page every five-minutes. I am still looking for a way to stream this data live.
We are about 62 miles west of Galveston so hurricanes can really jiggle our anemometer at landfall. We use a Davis Wizard into a popular weather-web application. We are still working on this page. Before long there will be way more information than you ever wanted to know about Spring, Tx. Just kidding.
There is also a link to my Ham Radio blabbering for my amateur radio pals. More at ARRL and QRZ. Most of us share these common interests so the seismology and weather stuff is probably right up your alley. My photography is a work in progress.
My Seismology Hobby
My current interest is playing with my earthquake seismic station. I bought pre-manufactured amps, filters and a 16-bit A/D converter designed and built by Larry Cochrane. My little station is currently equipped with two long-period horizontal modified Lehman sensors and a special broad-band vertical sensor all designed and hand made by my good friend John Cole (W5AUH). The Cole sensors are being used from North Texas to Louisiana and from South Texas to Guatemala, and have proven results for many years. In addition to winding his own coils (corrosion-proofed) and making all of the metal assemblies and sub-assemblies, he runs his own station testing all of his designs. His roller-ball and crossed-bearing pivot designs are brilliant. In my humble opinion this is a unique accomplishment and my hobby would have gone no where but for his friendship and guidance. If I detect an event, I usually post a (PSN) data file of the event recording on Larry’s website along with other hobbyists who post their own recordings as well. More often than not, some of the better postings come from folks who use John Cole’s sensors.
Our little station routinely records events from half-way around the earth. Large “teleseismic”events above MAG 6.0 usually present three good seismograms to our station – even from the Indian Ocean. Smaller Southern California events also show up particularly well. So do those from the Aluetians and New Zealand. Our two long-period horizontal sensors are both on the North/South axis. The T-Max is on a small concrete slab sitting on Gulf gumbo and extremely sensitive to thermal noise. See picture above. The Mini-Lehman is on the house slab and protected from thermal noise. The T-Max is capable of 27-seconds and the Mini always gets 17-seconds. In addition to showing our three helicorders I also place our latest LARGE event seismogram picture on the bottom part of the page. Associations: Amateur Seismologists Data Base. Amateur Teleseismic Net and Public Seismic Network.
Recent
Tinkering
I have been playing around with a little electronic project that has been bringing me a lot of fun. I found out about a LIGHTNING DETECTOR designed by Mr. Charles Wenzel - a true genius when it comes to making small VLF gadgets and other medium skill-level doodads. I highly recommend his web site for those curious to learn about some really simple but esoteric electronic doohickeys. I spent hours there looking at all of the circuits, schematics and pictures. Charles is quick to respond to questions via email. My original reason for researching this device was so that I could disconnect my ham radio antennas whenever lightning was in the area. It works perfect for that application. Once you get used to the way it acts under different weather conditions it becomes even more valuable and a great safety device. With the little rod antenna raised all the way up, sensitivity goes out to about 45 to 60 miles on most occasions of incoming frontal activity. That gives me plenty of warning to go into lightning mode. Here is Wenzel’s page that set me off.
I added a little LCD event counter to the original design that responds to every other tick of the detector using a flip-flop. This makes it easy to count the actual lightning strikes during an event instead of counting noisy household switches and the like. You can watch a little demo movie – Thunderstorm. The click-click you hear is not a latching relay. It is the demodulated sound of the RF signal coming out of an internal amp/speaker. The raw signal sounds like typical AM static and crackles and I can switch back and forth between these audio alerts. I’ve also dabbled with running the output of the RF stage through a DATAQ A/D converter and it looks doable that I can plot strikes on an oscilloscope-like display. My little unit is not very good looking – compared to many other similar projects - but it lets me experiment with multiple outputs – some buffered – like the DATAQ thing. Here are some others and they are really clever. Take a peek. See, mine looks shabby now doesn’t it?
DataQ Plot as Front Approaches (May 12, 2011 – Around 1:00 PM)
Thanks for dropping by…
73′s to my ham friends,
GeezerJoe
