Lessons learned in my first chase

Always check for power lines

This was a stupid mistake and something I knew better than to do.  Lucked out that nothing bad happened.

Know the counties

Once I decide to chase, I need to pull out a map and become familiar with the counties in the affected area.  Watches / Warnings are verbally given on a county-by-county basis.  I wasted WAY too much time looking for which county I was in.

Pre-Program the repeaters

Another thing I need to do before leaving on a chase is to locate the Ham Radio repeaters in the area and program them into my mobile.  If I actually spotted a tornado, I could not report it as the repeaters are different in different locations.  I also need to research how to determine which repeaters are used for SkyWarn®

Put my tactical / reflective vests on before approaching the storm

Putting my vest on when the wind was already 60 mph was challenging.  Also, the PTT mic cord was frustrating to run after putting the vest on.  Finally, walking outside of my vehicle without the reflective vest on was risky.

If I was adequately prepared, I would have set up the vest before heading out, and would have put it on when the storm was in range.

Finish my real-time GPS tracker

While the Esri map was more than adequate in showing me where the hazards were, knowing where I was on the map was unnecessarily time consuming. It also required me to manually paint my location on the map I posted to the blog.

This project is nearly completed.  I should also add a feature that captures the current map as a PNG and adds it to the blog entry so I could post faster.

Make sure my weather instruments are working before departing

An anemometer is no good when the display is not hooked up to it!

I am missing several key components

• Tablet - for displaying the map while driving
• Camera - chase is not much good to others if I don't have any photographs
• Weather Instruments - Wind speed is important, so is temperature, wind direction, barometric pressure, etc.