Boltek is stand alone. Single station gets you some information, albeit sort of crude range and direction.
These are two entirely different approaches.
Boltek listens to a signal, then determines as best it can the direction, and then using the strength of the signal and software that comes with or can be purchased separately, some attempts at averaging and statistics to figure out maybe how far away it is. Like seeing a picture of something and without surrounding reference having a clue as to how big it is. And therein lies this method's problems.
I have had a Boltek for over a decade, and have purchased both the popular add on software packages that go with it. One's advice in fine tuning the software is that, to paraphrase, it may take months of tweaking to get the approximate distances correct! MONTHS!
Turning to the Boltek solution, I have had my system running for a couple of months. IT IS NOT STANDALONE. The problem is that my station gets a signal, which by itself is useless. The magic, and I do mean magic, comes on board when that info is sent to servers that compare my time-stamped report of a strike to at least four others, sometimes up to twelve other messages from other users, and then computes where the strike might have been. While the innards of their algorithms haven't been shared, the basic concept isn't hard, but the math and correlations are.
The best the strike locator can do is about 300 meters, if everything is spot on. The error ranges posted with the strikes usually are a kilometer or so, and sometimes I see a three mile range error, but rarely more than that.
A few months ago I was able to watch an approaching storm coming into a city where I was in a 19 story building watching the isolated storm approach. I had some landmarks in the distance, and a road heading directly west of my location. Within a second one cloud to ground stroke occurred south of the road, and then another a short distance north of the road. Blitz's map showed those strikes and plotted them in darn near where I knew they had just hit. Spectacular.
However I have had many strikes occur about my home location, and because they were either not seen by enough other stations to generate enough information for the Blitz system to try to calculate a strike, or were no strong enough to be heard by the other stations, or were cloud to cloud, they did not ever plot on the map. My station was useless for seeing those near strikes since it overloads with such a powerful signal close at hand.
How about both? Dip your toe in with the Boltek, and work on a Blitz station (and access to the precise data maps) as you get to it?
Enjoy, no matter what.
Dale