Boltek Lightning/2000 - Manual (Page 18)

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How Lightning/2000 Works
Every lightning flash (whether it’s cloud-to-ground (CG) or
intercloud/intracloud (IC)) produces several electric pulses
(strokes) that are picked up by the antenna on your Boltek
system. Each of these strokes is analyzed to determine
whether it is lightning or not. The ones that aren’t lightning
are categorized as “noises”.
Note: only the LD-350, the StormTracker ISA or PCI
hardware allows you to discriminate between IC and CG
strokes. When using the LD-250, all strokes detected are of
the “unknown” type. This is because the LD-250 only passes
along very general information about each stroke, rather than
the detailed waveforms that are extracted from the other
hardware.
A noise can be either non-lightning electrical activity or
lightning that cannot be sufficiently analyzed. Some non-
lightning electrical activity looks enough like lightning that it
slips through the analysis and is logged as a lightning stroke.
Particularly during times of heavy lightning activity, some
strokes are so garbled that they cannot be discriminated as
CG or IC. These are discarded as noises. Most of these
garbled strokes are IC strokes. It is entirely possible that the
number of noises will equal or exceed the number of strokes
during times of heavy activity. This is normal and is not a
problem with the system. With version 4 of Lightning/2000,
a substantial percentage of these formerly discarded IC
strokes can be recovered. Because of their borderline nature,
they are not plotted unless you have selected the “Plot
recovered noises” option from the Options menu or the
Control Panel.
The “good” strokes are saved for analysis. The results of this
analysis end up being displayed in the Analysis window, the