Bingo! I was just about to jump on the www aspect. Because I am such a paranoid about weather, while I was in Florida, my goto source of info was always the laptop. I could bring up a whole host of tv station websites as well as NOAA and others and get the latest stream of data, much sooner than NOAA weather radio, and especially the TV set. I could watch the progress of cells moving in from the southwest and get a good idea of intensity, course and speed, and whether it was building up or running down. Even running around with just a blackberry, I could access the internet with it and check the weather, including local radar, although it was admittedly not as elaborate, but it did what I needed it to do. On the rare occasions where I lost power or the cable signal went down, I could at least get to the blackberry and see what was coming.

Now I have a wi-max feed to the house here in Denver. I think it may be a step up from the cable internet service, and certainly far better than phone DSL. Nothing is foolproof, but at least when the power goes out I still have at least two hours of life in the laptop batteries, or 24+ hours on the blackberry.

Combine that with a decent trunking scanner, and you probably have as it good as it gets for monitoring weather and/or other emergency situations.