At times we can hear lightening strikes and call it QRN lightening strikes.
On 40m we hear it and know storms not far away or less than 1000km and possible local ones looming up. But on 20m we know its further away by far.
On 20m this morning, noticed a fair amount of lightening strikes heard. So a trip to the lightening maps shows lot of lightening strikes over Greece and being heard here in SW UK on 20m. Be interesting now if could listen out for Sota’s from around that distance of over 2200km as at moment Spanish and Austrian Sota’s not being heard or barely.
I know lightening is powerful and all of that but its strikes are being propagated to here from there.
To me this is a propagation path indicator showing a path open down to the Greece area.
Natures beacons
I have noticed when talking with the US on 40m in the evening that the lightning strikes can be very noisy - but the lightning is a lot closer. Often in that case it is in the Tasman (between VK and ZL), so perhaps best not to think of it only being present at the destination, particularly with multi hop paths.
Don’t forget the height at which the lighting discharge starts. Part of the radiation comes from a very high point. This helps get into the ionosphere at a low angle and hence be heard at long range. The energy in even a small strike is Megawatts the pulse so the amount of rf in your ssb bandwidth has to be of the order of a 10 - 100 w rig. (Back of thr envelope calc). No wonder it can bounce the S meter so much.
Try listening for lightening scattered signals. I’ve heard them on 2 m but duration is very short due to the rapid neutralization of the ionised air.
