Monitoring station deactivated in 2019
The Pontese Mountain Refuge station was active from 2008 to 2019. It was the highest-altitude permanently operating observatory. Due to its location it allowed VLF signal receptions of particular purity. We left the web page as it was then, as a reminder of this experience.



CSP VLF MONITORING STATION
Live data from Pontese dew (TO), NW Italy, South Europe
Maintained by CSP Team
This monitoring station participated to OPERA2015 project (http://www.vlf.it/opera_2015/opera_2015.html)


This on line observatory makes available a couple of sensitive VLF receivers, installed in a low-noise location. This provides an ideal condition to listen to VLF signals directly from your home, and to make an high quality radio seismic monitoring. Pontese is 2217m dew, over Teleccio dam in Orco and Soana Valley, inside Gran Paradiso national park. To see on google map the site position click here.


A meteo station is placed here: http://wipie.csp.it/vos/mappa/mappa.php?ID_postazione=26#
and the webcam can be reach directly here: http://ham.radio.it/pontese.xspf  (using VNC player)



Antennas and Audio Stream

Two receiving system are placed there:

  • The electric field comes by 2 meters floating electric field antenna, with an ADA low noise receiver.
  • The magnetic component comes from a 1m squared loop, 24 turns of AWG12 copper wire, with a low noise preamplifier. The circuit is similar to the EasyLoop but with an AD797 operational amplifier.
Plain signal, as they comes from the antennas.
Click on the link to play: http://vlfspectrum.csp.it:8000/pontese124.m3u

The web page of the observatory is available here:
http://vlfspectrum.csp.it/cgi-bin/BrowseDumpPontese.pl

The entire VLF activity is stored and archieved in MP3 files for free download.


Observatory data 1

Daily multistrip representation: electric field spectrogram on top and the magnetic field on bottom.

The graph is updated every 15 minutes.


Observatory data 2

Low frequency activity, from 1 to 110 Hz: view on the last eight hours.
On the top the electric field spectrogram, on the bottom the magnetic one.

The picture is updated every hour.


Observatory data 3

Broad band frequency activity, from 1 to 16000 Hz: view on the last eight hours.
On the top the electric field spectrogram, on the bottom the magnetic one.

The picture is updated every hour.



System four: 9 kHz band

Monitoring of 9 kHz band. A reception window centered on 8970 Hz, for the monitoring of testing transmission of radio experimenters. Electric field on top, magnetic on the bottom.

It shows last 8 hours activity.


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.


Return to the index of http://www.vlf.it