On 8 Jan 2007 09:04:44 -0800, dpb wrote:

Yes, that's the advantage and we rely on it as well for such alerts. I
was simply meaning when already know there's weather around and it's
dark enough to not be able to spot an approaching funnel if there were
one -- otherwise, we're flat enough that most of the time you've got
clear enough view to know.

I understand now. Too hilly here to see anything until it's on you, so rely
heavily on the radio.

As I noted in a reply earlier, two things -- one, since it is an
agricultural area, the weather segment is longer and far more detailed
SNIPPED for brevity
recommendations/forecasts as outline above. You don't get that from
NWS or TWC and like haller says, "if you ain't seen it, you can't
understand" And, of course, unless one were intimately involved and
affected, it wouldn't be of any interest anyway.

I now understand about the local broadcasts. You jogged my memory of how it
was when I was a kid and they spent a lot of time with the weather. There
were (maybe still are) some programs that deal exclusively with agriculture
and they spent much of the program discussing projections, but mainly related
to crop conditions here as livestock wasn't so prevalent. There's also a
program on PBS dealing with aviation weather - quite interesting, but not
particularly useful to me.

TWC is useless here also, but the website has useful information - mainly
maps and radars. I was referring to the website for them and NWS and to using
the information from the sites to work things out yourself - I know from
experience that if you do it long enough you can get pretty darned good at
predicting what's going to happen. From what you've written in previous
posts, it would appear that you, like me, are no spring chicken and probably
have quite a bit of weather knowledge built up over the years that can be
applied to some basic tools like front movement forecasts and such to work
out a pretty good assessment of what the weather's gonna do. I suspect that
you probably do something very similar to that already with the local TV
broadcasts.

Still, I think that from what you've said, I'd try turning the antenna to the
new direction and see whether or not it's worthwhile to point in that
direction. If so, and it's only 2 directions, I'd just get 2 antennas and do
as suggested in other posts, mounting one pointing each direction. Rotator is
fine - got one myself - but can be a bit of a pain if you're trying to
fine-tune a weak station and it has to be pointed *just so* to pick it up.
Something else to consider, every time you add a gadget, it's something else
that can break.

But, in the end, I'm just interested on top of all the rest!

Same here. Always been interested in weather, even had a little weather
station when I was growing up. Always figured it had something to do with
growing up in the country instead of the city as I have an interest in most
things in the outdoors.


Later, Mike
(substitute strickland in the obvious location to reply directly)
-----------------------------------


Please send all email as text - HTML is too hard to decipher as text.