Ground-Breaking Lightning Study Uses GaGe Razor Express High-Speed Digitizer

Razor Express digitizer is an integral part of the VHF broadband interferometer designed to investigate high-energy radiation from lightning strikes and multi-stroke positive cloud-to-ground flashes.

A doctoral dissertation published in 2022 by Michelle Urbani, a PhD candidate at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech describes the development of a VHF broadband interferometer to investigate and better understand unsolved lightning phenomena.

Very high frequency (VHF) is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) designation for radio frequency electromagnetic waves that occur within a frequency range of 30 MHz to 300 MHz and a wavelength range of 10 meters to 1 meter. A VHF broadband interferometer is a system used to locate sources of radiation events at the VHF band by extracting the differences of phases at various frequency components of Fourier spectra between a pair of antennas.

For this study, the interferometer was designed to measure the electric field of lightning discharges in the VHF band with the paper describing its design and implementation, its calibration and testing in the field, and concluding that the developed system can measure the electric field of lightning discharges in the VHF band with high accuracy. This article highlights the use of the GaGe Razor Express 16-bit PCIe digitizer as part of the developed system utilized to capture the high-speed lightning events that contributed to the successful project.