I think that you hurricane folks make a good point as to location having an impact on what is useful and what is not. TV and other broadcasts media is useless in my area where tornados can and do form within minutes in the middle of a storm. If you have ever had 2 or 3 or more tornados wonder around your town, perhaps forming and disolving multiple times, you realize that by the time the information gets handed down to broadcast it is old and useless - perhaps making it dangerous even. That's when you need to get the raw data and analyze it yourself.
If you're talking about a huricane that you can track for days... that's alot different.
How reliable is your cell connection in the middle of a hurricane?

Sure, I'm not saying that it's completely useless - it gets the warning out and that's often all that's required to save lives. Our broadcasters stay on the air for the duration, but they mostly just repeat the fact that there's a tornado, seek shelter. If you want to know if it's on the west side of town, or the east side of town, or if there's one forming south of you going north, then it's time to break out the scanner and listen to the spotter network. By the time the broadcasters get wind of what's happening you could be gone. 5 minutes is a long time.
I guess I'm talking about getting breaking updates as opposed to information that may be too old to matter much. Now, if you've already taken shelter when the sirens were first sounded then it really wouldn't matter too much. But I prefer to know more than "there's a tornado in the area, you could be affected." If you take your portable TV in the hole with you, you're still really only going to know that "there's a tornado in the area, you could be affected." And that's great if that's all you want. I want to know about which field the tornado is in, them funny looking clouds that just started rotating, that other tornado that is on the north side of town but going north, etc.
Then again I could just be paranoid about tornados after 1980 when half the city was leveled.

I think this would be especially true in a man made disaster such as chemical leaks and such. That seems like such a fluid situation that you would not want to wait for information updates. If you are evacuating, doubly so.

So feel free to take your portable TV because there's certainly no harm in doing so, but augment your assessment capability with a good quality portable scanner.

I dunno, while I was in Central Florida it seemed there was never enough timely and accurate info coming out of the local tv stations. About the time NOAA weather radio was tripping to alert, you'd see the update on the TV, which was usually when the storm was already on top of you. When TS Olga went across the state last Christmas, it was moving too fast for even NOAA radio alerts to keep up, and when it got to Seminole/Volusia County lines, it dropped a funnel with almost no warning, and the only way I knew where and when was the laptop connection. I had been up that morning early and was tracking it from across the state on the TV, but when it turned due west from Eustis, I fired up the laptop and kept a closer eye on it. Fortunately it was on the other side of town from us when the funnel came down, but if we had been in the path, only the laptop feed would've given me any warning, short of hearing the train coming down the tracks so to speak. Other times it seemed like we were getting the flash/bang of an approaching cell, then the TV would send a new, general area warning out, whereas I could keep track of the particular cell on the laptop right up to it encroaching in our neighborhood. You won't get the weatherman's commentary with such near real time feed, but the graphics are usually enough to make your own conclusions, especially after you've been through a few.

TV is better than nothing I reckon, but for watching as close to real time as possible, nothing beats the laptop/blackberry setup short of dedicated feed. There's so much information out there to collect on the net that usually I checked the TV for confirmation of what I already knew.

It also seemed like when Fay came through and dropped a couple small funnels there in Brevard County that the TV was playing catch-up with telling people the tornado was upon them. Of course, in all them trailer courts, all you can do is try and run anways.

Barring power and/or service outages, my home is like comm central when bad weather is impending. I usually fire up the TV, portable police radio, weather radio, AM/FM/shortwave radio receiver and internet, collectively pumping info as fast as I can digest it (that's if I'm off-duty and not one of the storm spotters/chasers). It's exhilarating and scary, even for one who moves toward gun fire instead of away from it.

Yep, unless you are pretty much looking at it at the time it forms, you won't know until it's darned near on you. About the best you can do is watch the cells and convergent zones on radar and try and assess the risk. I get a kick outta watching these "Storm Chasers". What fool would drive into a cell at night knowing it is likely to produce a twister somewhere near you? Even these guys with their own portable doppler systems can't always make out the telltale pattern until they get a visual confirmation anyways. The best you get is the ability to predict when the conditions are good for one to form, but that is often just hit and miss, and not much better than when Uncle Jimmy would stick his head out the back door and look at the sky.

Hate to admit it, but I'm a visual person. Having the maps on the screen allows me to better understand where the storms are firing up.

DFW TV stations have spent a ton of money upgrading their radar systems and coming up with timely updates.

Additionally, there are so many counties in North Texas that I keep a set of maps next to the weather radio. I never can remember the locations and names of all of the nearby counties.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that I won't be able to afford the new digital portable TVs. Guess I'll be relying upon AM radio and my paper maps.

Everyone complains about this, but the coverage in my area, Eastern Nebraska, has been excellent. NOAA radio is great here. Where do you live?

I was saying the TV coverage is delayed from the NOAA radio. The NOAA is great, the tv people delay it then think about it then have a meeting to decide if they want to broadcast it, etc.

Cool setup! Can't find the Laura online. Can you help?

Ahh. That doesn't happen here. Constant coverage for a thunderstorm. Its gotten a little stupid.