lightning detector

I came across an interesting site by Charles Wenzel called techlib.com. His site contains a lot of interesting projects. The first one that caught my eye was the various lightning detector circuits.

There is a lot more detail on the techlib site, including the theory behind the detector and test circuits along with other cool projects, so I’d encourage you to take a look.

Here is the schematic for the detector that I built.

I initially put it together on a bread board.

I used my little slayer exciter circuit to test the detector.

Once I knew that the circuit worked, I transferred everything to a piece of perf board.

Now for the final test…

It still works!

I guess the actual final test would be to wait until there is an actual thunderstorm and see how well it performs.