MST

N.W. Phoenix Weather Conditions

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Location: Phoenix, Arizona, 85053 USA

Latitude: 33° 37' 8" Longitude: 112° 8" 44"

Altitude: 1275' above Sea Level

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Boltek Lightning Detector Installation

The hardware for the Boltek Stormtracker is fairly straight forward, a PCI board to be installed in you're computer, antenna module and 50' of cable. The only difficult part is deciding on the mounting location of the antenna. The Boltek site has some information on mounting location along with pictures of customer locations. After reading this information along with some information from the manual, you are lead to believe that higher is better. Evidently the lighting strike energy will penetrate most anything except metal, and mounting the antenna too high allows it to pick up a lot of false readings. After reviewing my options, I opted to mount the antenna on my anemometer mast.

This mounting option located the antenna about 150' from the computer, requiring a longer cable. After examining the cable that came with the detector, I noticed it was constructed from cat 5e cable and rj45 connectors (standard lan wiring components). The wiring of the connectors is not the same as a standard lan cable. If you have the capability to make cables, follow the connections in the factory cable. This is what I did, and it appears to work fine.

In mounting the antenna some protection has to be provided for the cable connection. Following pictures of other installations, I opted to enclose and mount the antenna using pvc pipe.

Clicking on any of the pictures below will display a larger image.

The antenna housing was constructed by gluing together a 3" ABS cap to a 3" ABS coupling. The picture shows the housing along with the antenna with nylon mounting bolts.
Antenna installed in housing. The bottom of the housing is a 3"x11/2" ABS adaptor. The adapter and housing were not glued, so the top can be removed in the future.
The support was constructed from 11/2" pvc pipe and assorted fittings. The antenna cable extends through the pvc pipe and exists the bottom.
Antenna and pvc pipe mounted on anemometer mast. You may also notice the weather cam mounted on the mast.

 

This page last updated: 04/12/2003