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Lightning and LQ?

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KG6JEI
Lightning and LQ?

All,

Out here in Southern California we don't often get lighting strikes, but in other places of the country I know they are very common.

So a question for those who are in lighting prone areas. I know I've seen lighting affect Cable and DSL links (DSL especially) and HF bands, I can't recall if it affected my cellular link or not, so haa anyone ever looked during a storm to see if the LQ of the links goes down more than just during a rain storm of similar magnitude?

Perhaps this is something that will need to wait a couple versions for some good solid monitoring to be in the SNMPD.  Just a curiosity  of mine  after talking with a fellow friend in Texas and wondering how lighting would affect deployments

K5DLQ
K5DLQ's picture
I would think the rain that

I would think the rain that accompanies the lighting would be the significant factor

KG6JEI
I suspect as much as well,

I suspect as much as well, however I wonder if there is any additive effect from the lighting as well  (I'm not that familiar with RFI caused by Lightning and how high the spectrum it goes)

Power drops might be an even bigger issue if the units are not on a smoothed power line (last big storm I was in was ages ago but the power where I was at would seem to dip significantly when strikes occurred) 

Of course being that close good unit grounding is also key to avoid surges to the node (plug to remind all that the shield wire on all these units is suppose to be pulled to ground to reduce inducted surges on the cat5)

K5DLQ
K5DLQ's picture
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org

This paper analyzes the interference of lightning flashes with wireless communication systems operating in the microwave band at 2.4 GHz. A bit error rate (BER) measurement method was used to evaluate BER during 3 heavy thunderstorms on January 25, March 17 and March 20, all in year 2011. In addition, BER measurements also were done on January 21 and March 30, 2011 under fair weather (FW) conditions providing a baseline for comparison. The Transmitter-Receiver separation was fixed at 10 meter with line-of-sight (LOS) consideration. We infer that lightning interfered with the transmitted digital pulses which resulted in a higher recorded BER. The maximum recorded BER was 9.9·10-1 and the average recorded BER was 9.95·10-3 during the thunderstorms with the average fair weather BER values under the influence of adjacent channel interference (ACI) and co-channel interference (CCI) being 1.75·10-5 and 7.35·10-6 respectively. We conclude that wireless communication systems operating at 2.4 GHz microwave frequency can be significantly interfered by lightning.

FROM:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6344355&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6344355

 

KG6JEI
"DOH"

"DOH"

Interesting, that is a decent size jump in the bit error rate, will be curious how big an effect that has on the real world where other factors are at play.

Interesting to know we have to plan on lighting degrading the links as well. \

Thanks Darryl, I hadn't even though to do a search before hand that there might be other research on the subject.

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