It seems to me that one thing we can do this summer, while Egon et. al take a well-deserved vacation, is work to maintain interest and patience among those who have seen the publicity...
Part of that quality operation is likely going to mean something like "Maximum Quality Distance" for my station. 2500km was cool, but not quality. 1200km may be the new "cool and high quality" standard for me... I'll have a 50% LD efficiency instead of 90. So what. I'll also have a "20-40% locating ratio" instead of "2-20%"
This is one of the issues that I have run across - what are the priorities as far as the measurables go? When you go to the Blitzortung.org website, EL is the default measurable so that is the one I try to achieve. Locating ratio is not even on that page or highlighted being important on the station statistics page. Chart #1 is stroke count (EL), #2 is signal count, and then #3 is locating ratio.
Roughly speaking, my strokes are about 10% of my signals, and of that 10% strokes, 10% up to 25% of those are minimum stations. So if the station is at 98% El with 10,000 strokes, ~1,500 are minimum station strokes. If the gain is turned down to reduce the other 9,000 signals that were not strokes, the whole count for Northern America will be down.
Lets look at it this way:
Active Day: 100,000 signals 10,000 strokes 90,000 not recorded as lightning
Slow Day: 10,000 signals 1,000 strokes 9,000 not recorded as lightning
Difference 81,000 not recorded as lightning
For the sake of discussion let's say that on a Slow Day, the 10,000 signals minus 1,000 strokes = 9,000 are noise. That 9,000 noise would still be true on an active day with 100,000 signals. So the difference of 81,000 is not noise, but strokes that did not have verification by other 5 stations. If they were noise then wouldn't they still show up on slow days? Now when we get more stations with proper coverage across America, then the 81,000 will be verified and there will be no need for my station to pick them up.
For this reason, I figure that top priority is detecting as many strikes as possible, especially because the majority of lightning strikes are not being detected at all. During the active days we had had recently, on many times I saw 15% of my strikes were min station strikes. Because I was at 99% EL, that is also ~15 % of all the network strikes. If any one of the 6 stations were turned down to reduce unverified signals, the network would have missed these strokes. And because the main server is not complaining about unverified signals and/or noise yet, I crank it up. Once there is coverage as the system is designed and we are catching them all, then my station will not need to reach Costa Rica or Manitoba and it is time to throttle back and reduce unwanted noise.
