Re: [SLUG] [PIG] Visual Basic

From: Eben King (eben01@verizon.net)
Date: Sat Jul 15 2006 - 16:21:35 EDT

On Sat, 15 Jul 2006, Chuck Hast wrote:

> On 7/15/06, Eben King <eben01@verizon.net> wrote:
>> I'm talking to a guy who has a lightning detection rig, shown here:
>>
>> http://members.home.nl/fkooiman/lightning/index.htm
>>
>> What I have a question about is that its driver is: " Visual Basic
>> program that detects the direction to the source of the lightning strike
>> with an accuracy of 1 degree". Is there any way to run VB in Linux, or
>> to translate that code to something that _can_ be run?
>
> You might want to start with this....
>
> http://www.baudline.com/
>
> This tool can have up to 9 input channels, (you already have two which are
> the left and right audio channels on your sound card, a second card will
> add two more channels.

Ah! I have an onboard sound card which I'm not using (my SB Live! is much
better).

> Looking at what the guy is doing with the hardware/software, I assume that
> he is using the two antennas to obtain gross vector data, and he is
> probably also rotating the antennas electronicly in order to get the
> vector data he needs to determine the direction that the dischange came
> from.

If by that you mean no physical motion of the antennas occurs, then I agree.
The received amplitude of a signal is proportional to something like the
cosine of the angle between "straight ahead" and "toward the source". This
means the received amplitude of the other antenna is proportional to its
sine, and hence their ratio is proportional to its tangent.

> You will probably need to do the same thing, but I think that you can
> probably work with baudline to be a display for your data. Baudline is
> pretty good about working with you on such things to,

> The more channels (antennas) you can add to it the better the resolution
> and other data.

I'd need access to another site with a similar setup, the further away the
better (as long as their ranges overlap), to locate the strikes on a map by
triangulation. That and a method of clock synchronization. 

-- 
-eben     QebWenE01R@vTerYizUonI.nOetP     royalty.no-ip.org:81

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity,
     and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
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