In order to get ready for the season I picked up a few basic things that I would need to help in my endeavor to find some storms. My first objective was to build some sort of laptop mounting system to hold my laptop. I looked into the cost of getting a standard one and after seeing the price of them I said forget it and looked for other options. I stumbled onto a site that a guy had used some pvc pipe and a few other things to make one for his truck and after looking at my car decided that this would be the best bet and most cost efficient for me. The way the laptop mount is designed is that it uses the cup holder in the console to steady the mount and I chose to use the passenger seat to help stablize the mount as well. It is not the prettiest thing but it works great for me and after a trial run the mount didn't have any issue for me at all as far as stability and use.Here are a few photos of the finished mount I made.
I had to add a few layers of duct tape to make the 2" pvc coupling to fit a little more tighter in the cup holder. I added some aluminum L chanel to help hold the laptop on the mount and made openings for usb ports and one for the fan in the laptop. The bottom of the tee fits right on the passenger seat and stablizes the whole thing rather well. As I said it's not pretty but it was cheaper to make than any other options I had. All parts costs were about $25.00.
In order to run my laptop for extended periods of time I picked up a dc to ac inverter from Harbor Freight. I was told it is better to get a bigger inverter but since I am not doing any video right now I only needed something to charge my laptop and possibly my camera batteries and I didn't want to have to hard wire an Inverter directly to the battery at this time so I had seen that the one I bought also came with the cig lighter plug but isn't stated on the box and when I got the inverter it did come with the lighter plug in it as well as some clamps to hard wire it. The inverter has a continuous power of 200 watts more than enough for my laptop. It was about $26.00 for the inverter. I have yet to purchase any radar software for my laptop but did purchase an app for my phone that works well for finding storms and keeping an eye on them. I find that it is a great app and worth the money. It is called PYKL3 Radar for Android. What I really like is that it places a gps marker on the radar map of where you are at in comparison to were the storm is. I would recommend it to people on a budget like me.
I don't use a data card yet either for my laptop I have been using a tethering app for my Verizon phone to get internet to my laptop and it works great. It is called PdaNet and was about $18.00 when I purchased it originally. http://www.junefabrics.com/android/
Now that I had some basic items to chase with I knew from looking at the SPC http://www.spc.noaa.gov/ that there was going to be a chance of storms and possible tornadoes for the day in Northeastern Nebraska and NW Iowa not to far from Sioux City, IA. There was also a Severe Weather Symposium going on in Lincoln also that day which I have attended for the last 3 years and I wanted to make an apperience there as well in the morning. I ended up getting there around 11am or so and finally met someone that has been helping me learn about storm chasing and does a lot of chasing on his own and lives only 30 or so miles from me. Scott Bennett is a great guy and very helpful. He has a website http://www.endlessweather.com/ and I would recommend checking it out. After talking to Scott for a while he had a friend coming up from Oklahoma to chase with him in Iowa Ben Holcomb http://www.benholcomb.com/ Ben was just about to Lincoln so Scott, Ryan and I met up with Ben at a chicken place here in Lincoln and ate lunch and talked about the day. Scott and Ben took off after lunch to head up to Iowa and I decided to head home to get ready for the day and get stuff together to drive up North behind them. I had my 2nd oldest son for the weekend he is 20 and has always had a fascination with tornado's so when I got back home I told him to get ready we were going to go chase down some storms and maybe see a tornado. He thought I was joking but after a bit he knew I was serious and was a little nervous but I thought It would be a good day to spend some one on one time with him and to just kind of spend the day together as it isn't to often him and I get to do that at all so after getting ready we took off from Lincoln on our way up north to where the storms were predicted to be later in the afternoon.It was a good couple hours to get to where the storms were going to start coming together we ened up about 30 miles south of Sioux City and with the time limitations I had to get back to Lincoln I decided to stay on the west side of the Missouri River just east of Bancroft Ne. I was seeing all the pro chasers converging on the Iowa side of the river and had I more experience and time I would of crossed the river into Iowa and hung out with Scott and Ben but it looked pretty busy over there so I hoped to see something on the west side of the Missouri river..well my inexperience showed that day as my son and I got to see just the storm staring up and then heading over the river into Iowa where it did produce tornado's a while later and ended up hitting a town in Iowa. It was a good learning experience and we did get to few photos of the storm starting up and of another storm that was heading from the southwest that we would try to met up with but didn't manage to get where we needed to get for that one as it was moving rather fast and we were just to far away from it. My goal for the day to to at least get some storm photos and to spend some time with my son. Even though we didn't get to see any tornado's we had some good one on one time together and I know that he will be talking about it for a while with his friends. Here are some of the photos I took from that day.
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