IK1QFK VLF MONITORING STATION
Live data from CUMIANA (TO), NW Italy, south Europe
Maintained by Renato Romero

(To see on google map click this link  (44,96° NORTH - 7,42° EAST)
 

System one: LIVE mp3 audio streaming

Audio signals coming from Marconi antenna: a big "T" 11 m high with a double top hat 45 m long.
You can listen the audio streaming live clicking here: http://67.207.143.181/vlf15.m3u
 

The audio streaming server is provided by Paul Nicholson.
See at Paul's page "Live VLF Natural Radio" for others audio stream availables: http://abelian.org/vlf/

Here below the first LIVE spectrogram, updated every hour at xx:01.
It shows the last 8 hours VLF activity, as received by Marconi antenna (electric field).


 

System two: GEOMAR

Amplitude scale: two channels listed below.

Picture, updated at xx:05 minutes of every hour, shows last 8 hours. All date and times are in UTC.
The scroll time is 40 s, and the frequency resolution 61 mHz.
As the receiving station is placed not too far from an industrial area, sometimes strong tones are detected by geophone sensor, caused by mechanical machine (1 km far from here).

Here below the same data elaborated as plotting traces. The picture shows the last 30 hours, and values are detected every 150 s.

Picture, updated at xx:05 minutes of every hour. Four traces are reported:


 

System three: MINIMAL

Spectrum scale: magnetics components of the spectrogram below with long term average curve (red) and last waterfall line.
Spectrogram: magnetic filed received with a single "minimal loop"  NS oriented (see at the article http://www.vlf.it/minimal/minimal.htm and http://www.vlf.it/minimal2/minimal2.html for technical details). Frequency range 1 to 105 Hz. System sensitivity of 0.5 pT @ 10 Hz.

Picture, updated at xx:03 of every hour, shows last 8 hours. All date and times are in UTC.
The scroll time is 40 s, and the frequency resolution 61 mHz.
Magnetic landscape is worse than the electric one: the receiving station, although in a country place,  is placed few km far from an high power line (380 kV !) and next to an industrial area (1 km).

System four: INDUCTION COIL

Spectrum scale: magnetics components of the spectrogram below with long term average curve (red) and last waterfall line.
Spectrogram: magnetic filed received with an ICS101 Induction Coil (look here for some technical data) with high permeability core, electric field shielding, internal low noise preamp and filter. Frequency range 0.1 – 120 Hz, with a sensitivity of 1 pT at 1 Hz,  here with a 30 Hz low pass filter turned ON.

Schumann resonaces are almost always visible: when not covered by local noise coming from 380 kV high power line.  Also the cars, passing 25 m away from the sensor, leave their trace in the area below 10 Hz. The coil is simply connected to the MIC input of a Realtek 97 audio card.

Here below the real time situation about lighting strikes in Europe. Courtesy of http://www.blitzortung.org

Unattended operations, signal conditioning, spectrograms and RDF functions are performed with SpectrumLab: http://freenet-homepage.de/dl4yhf/spectra1.html . Many thanks to Wolfgang Buscher for his support.
Automatic FTP process is realized with SyncBack Freeware V3.2.14 http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html.

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