Maybe, but this is Slashdot, and users here are probably on the heavier end of data use. As a practical matter, only T-mobile prepaid is competitive with AT&T or Verizon insofar as raw speed and/or bulk gigabyte pricing is concerned... and T-mobile is *very* much "feast or famine". Where they're good, they're awesome. Everywhere else, they totally suck for data. There's no middle ground with them. You either have rock-solid 6-20mbps HSPA+ or LTE, or you're limping at 80-150kbps on EDGE (but still probably doing better than Sprint).

That said... T-mobile's coverage is now fairly decent, as long as the overwhelming majority of your use is in the 80% or so of urban America where they're good. Just don't even bother to *fantasize* about depending upon them for high-speed data when you go stormchasing in semi-rural areas, let alone western Kansas, South Dakota, or most of Alabama beyond cities like Birmingham, Montgomery, or Tuscaloosa. For stuff like that, you really need AT&T *and* Verizon... maybe US Cellular too, to avoid totally burning through your Verizon data. (Note: they don't like to talk about it much, but if you can pick up a cheap Verizon data modem or older hotspot for $10-60 on ebay, you can prepay Verizon data by the day, week, or month, and just keep the modem/hotspot around for a rainy day (ok, sorry... shamelessly bad pun).

Every time a state starts printing metric speed limits, it inevitably ends up rounding the limit DOWN.

I remember one failed experiment where FDOT (Florida) tried to be cute and put up signs declaring "44kph" to be the metric equivalent of 30mph (it's only 27mph). The signs were SO hated, most of them got vandalized beyond recognition within a month, and pretty much ALL of them had the "44" spray painted, X'ed (with black markers), or shot out (with BBs, paintball pellets, or real honest-to-god bullets) by the time FDOT took them down and replaced them with 30mph signs. FDOT later admitted that it was a mistake.

If you want the public to accept metric speed limits, roll them out with a big public campaign that emphasizes that the limits are being RAISED everywhere by up to 5mph. Instantly, metric speed limits will become popular and cool among drivers. Declare 115kph (71.45mph) to be the equivalent of 70mph, and drivers will like them. Round it up to 120kph (74.56mph), and drivers will LOVE them. Try pulling another FDOT stunt by putting up signs saying "70mph/111kph", and they'll get vandalized beyond recognition within days.

Yes, T-mobile can be a good option, except for the fact that if you subscribe to the one plan they have with 5gb HSPA+/LTE per month and nominally-unlimited calls & text, they might be a whopping $5/month cheaper after you subtract the ETF for somebody else from the retail purchase price of a $699 best of breed Android phone, divide the result by 24, and subtract it from the other carriers' monthly rates for comparable service.

The main theoretical benefit of T-Mo is the ability to buy arbitrary phones... but between 1700MHz HSPA+ (they're still refarming, and 1700/2100 support among non-American phones is still pretty rare) and LTE (in some places) that's every bit as proprietary and non-interoperable with imported phones as LTE from AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, the benefits are mostly academic. At best, T-Mobile is more like a step sideways that's a little cheaper and not much worse (or maybe a solid step up from Sprint overall).

Now, if you're an elderly person with a Jitterbug who uses it to call for a ride to church once a week, the equation might be a bit different. But if you have a high-end phone that's permanently in use throughout the day & you treat Youtube like a free on-demand radio station in your car, or you leave the phone on your desk at work like a picture frame streaming 4 security cameras from home all day so you can keep an eye on your cats while you work, most prepaid service will be either lacking or way more expensive.

Recharging your laptop & running an air conditioner is a bit difficult without a generator.

In South Florida, the line between "air conditioner" and "life support system" is kind of blurry compared to drier & cooler parts of the country. Remember, Florida south of what's now I-4 was largely *uninhabited* (in the summer, at least) before air conditioning became widespread. Without A/C, Miami is *uninhabitable* in the summer.

100 years ago, not even the SEMINOLE INDIANS voluntarily remained in South Florida all year... when left alone by the Federal Government, even *they* migrated a few hundred miles north every summer.

If Miami has an earthquake, either an asteroid just slammed into Mexico or Georgia, or geologists are going to have to re-evaluate just about everything they know about plate tectonics and geology.

There are few places where an earthquake is inconceivable. South Florida is one of them.

Before everyone has a European-model lovefest, I should point out that that the European model has been *spectacularly* wrong about a few hurricanes over the past 2 years with respect to South Florida landfall (or non-landfall). I remember at least one (possibly Sandy or Isaac) where it was totally out in wacky-land ~5 days out, and didn't converge back into agreement with reality until 2-3 days later.

OK, here's a hard benefit: imagine how much money it costs a company like Citibank to close offices for a day or more in anticipation of an upcoming storm. It's staggering. If it allows a company like that to make better decisions about which offices and branches are unquestionably going to have to be closed, and which ones might be able to safely remain open, the hard dollar value would be measured in millions. Ditto for concert venues, sporting events, tourist destinations (hello, Disney? Myrtle Beach?), and pretty much anything where the cost of cancelling some event planned months in advance is substantial.

It extends to small businesses, and working people, too. Many service-industry employees (waiters, waitresses, hotel maids, etc) only get paid for hours they work. If a hotel/restaurant is closed for a storm, that's money out of their next paycheck. If better forecasts allow the hotel/restaurant to remain open instead of having to evacuate the tourists early, that's a very good thing. Ditto, for those tourist families on vacation. Good forecasts could make the difference between having their expensive vacation ruined, and enjoying another day or two on the beach.

AFAIK, 256kbps frame relay at WSR88-D sites, and 128kbps ISDN at TDWR sites. I believe they're now in the process of upgrading the TDWR sites to 256kbps frame-relay, and enabling 1-minute updates for tilt-1 data as they get the backhaul updates completed.

The big, huge, immediate improvement from backhaul upgrades is basically 1-minute updates for the lower tilt. I believe they're doing TDWR now, and hoping to use it as a demonstration of value to gain support for doing the same for the WSR88D sites "really soon". That said, I think the upgrades might have fallen victim to the budget sequester, because they haven't (officially, AFAIK) said a word about them in several months, even though they were all supposed to be coming online right about now. :-(

Reliability is a *huge* issue.

Consumer-grade broadband is NOTORIOUSLY vulnerable to regional power outages... something that tends to happen simultaneously with bad storms. Imagine the outrage if South Florida lost its radar every time the outer rain bands of a hurricane started to knock out the local power grid, or if Oklahoma or Kansas lost their radar when an advancing squall line knocked out Comcast's power a half hour before the parade of tornadoes following it arrived?

Even if they had lower-res lower-bandwidth modes to fall back on, the fact remains that they can't have weather radar failing precisely when it's needed the most. They MUST have reliable broadband that doesn't depend upon commercial power, backed up with SLAs that have teeth and real penalties if the telco doesn't keep up its end of the deal.

You're mostly right, but you're overlooking the software limits that exist mainly due to the limited bandwidth. If they upgraded the sites to a full T1 and tweaked the software a bit, they could give us new tilt-1 updates every minute, with about 15-60 seconds of radar-to-end-user latency, without major hardware upgrades besides the T1 interface itself.

Compare that to now, where we get only a single tilt-1 scan every 6 minutes, and that scan might itself be delayed by another 6-10 minutes on top of that. There are ALREADY several VCP programs that sample tilt 1 every minute... they just can't send out that data, and only use it locally for calculating their derived products, because they don't currently have the dedicated bandwidth to send it out.

Remember, WSR88D is kind of like an Atari 2600... it has very few limits that are truly "hard" and insurmountable. Rather, they're software-imposed in recognition of other limiting factors like backhaul bandwidth, or are precautionary limits imposed to guarantee that some specific product can always be fully-derived and delivered within some specific amount of time, or in a way that won't be destroyed by random errors. Many of them could be substantially improved with even minor hardware upgrades in other areas.

There are real limits to resolution imposed by scattering, wavelength, and particle size, but from what I've read, the current level 2 scan data is still throwing away about 30-50% of the nominal max resolution, and enormous amounts of theoretical resolution that could be recovered through oversampling. At this point, NWS doesn't even *know* what they could derive offsite from oversampled level 2 data, because they've never had the backhaul resources to even *fantasize* about streaming it in its full oversampled glory, or even archiving it all on site. 20 years ago, the idea of having 64 terabytes of on-site raid storage for Amazon/Google-like raw indiscriminate archiving would have been unthinkable, and never even entered into the equation.

The current scan rates are a compromise that tries to balance their backhaul against the need to track fast-moving storms like tornadoes. If they mounted a second, fixed-tilt dish back to back with the current dish so that every rotation produced a tilt-1 sample, they could alternate the back-facing samples between slow and fast pulse rates (so every other scan would be alternately optimized for range or resolution), and dedicate the front-facing dish currently in place to sampling the higher tilts (interleaving them to sample lower tilts twice at both PRF rates). Freed of the need to dedicate at least two full sweeps out of each volume scan to tilt 1 (because the back-facing antenna would sample tilt one every time the dish rotated), they could possibly slow down the rotation rate and use it to increase the resolution.

The closest thing I've seen to my idea was a paper someone at NOAA wrote about a year or two ago, proposing a compromise between fixed-tilt back-to-back conventional radar, and full-blown (and likely to be cost-prohibitive) phased-array radar 360-degree fixed radar. Basically, their idea was to build a limited wedge of PAR modules capable of sampling 4 tilts over ~1 degree horizontal, and mount it to the back side of the existing dish assembly, so that it could sample 4 tilts per revolution, and give us the equivalent resolution of 4-tilt level 3 TDWR every 12-15 seconds. The idea is that NOAA would then have a TDWR-resolution rapidly-updating radar source for tracking fast-moving/rapidly-developing storms off the back, and could slow down the overall rotation to get more detailed ultra-hires samples than we have now off the front dish.

The catch, from what I recall, was that they'd HAVE to decrease the RPM, and use 5.8GHz (like TDWR) for the rear array, because there just isn't enough C-band 10cm spectrum available to simultaneously broadcast 5 pulse beams without creating an interference scenario that would make their current range-folding issues look downright tame. They'd have to reduce the rotation rate to get enough range (TDWR's current short range timing has a range of about 50 miles, which is barely enough for most existing WSR88D sites to cover their own downtown areas, let alone outer suburbia in the direction away from the RDA).

Nevertheless, it's an interesting proposal. Going forward beyond that, the combination of PAR with tilt and rotation (instead of fixed in orientation) gives you the ability to do scanner-like oversampling. Increase the horizontal PAR width, and you can rotate it faster without sacrificing resolution, as long as you can do FHSS frequency-hopping from pulse to pulse. A distant echo will register at the far end of the sensor array as frequency #1... a nearby echo might register near the middle of the sensor arc as frequency #2. And so on. Eventually, when PAR technology becomes cheaper, the rotation rate can be slowed down. When you can afford to sense 180 degrees instead of 90, you can rotate half as fast. When you can afford to sense 360 degrees instead of 180, you can eliminate the rotation entirely, or rotate slowly to double your horizontal resolution at the expense of framerate.

Supercomputing improvements are nice, but I personally want to see them get the cash to profoundly increase their NEXRAD backhaul (the data lines connecting their radar sites to the outside world).

Right now, they're HORRIBLY backhaul-constrained. I believe most/all NEXRAD sites only have 256kbps frame relay to upload raw data to NOAA's datacenter for further processing & distribution to end users. As a result, they're forced to throw away data at the radar site to trim it down to size, and send it via UDP with little/no modern forward error correction. That's a major reason why glitches are common. In theory, the full-resolution data is archived to tape on site and CAN be mailed in if some major weather event happens that might merit future study, but the majority of collected data gets archived to tape, then unceremoniously overwritten a few days later. And most of the tapes that DO get sent in sit in storage for weeks or months before finally getting added to their near-line data archive.

The low backhaul bandwidth is made worse by the fact that the secondary radar products (level 3 radar, plus the derived products like TVS) get derived on site, and wedged into the SAME bandwidth-constrained data stream. That's part of the reason why level 3 data lags by 6-15 minutes... they send the raw level 2 data, and interleave the previous scan's level 3 data into the bandwidth that's left over. I believe the situation with TDWR sites is even worse... I think THEY actually have a single ISDN line, which is why level 2 data from them isn't available to the public at all.

As I understand it, they can't use lossless compression for two reasons -- since they have no error correction for the UDP stream, a glitch would take out a MUCH bigger chunk of data (possibly ruining the remainder of the tilt's data), and the error correction would defeat the size savings from the compression. Apparently, the processors at the site are pretty slow (by modern computer standards), so it would also add significant delay to getting the data out. When you're tracking a tornado running across the countryside at 50-60mph, 30 seconds matters.

If NWS had funding to increase their backhaul to at least T-1 speeds, they could also tweak their scan strategies a bit to make them more useful to others. For example, they could do more frequent tilt-1 scans (the lowest level, which is the one that usually affects people the most directly), and almost immediately upgrade all current NEXRAD sites to have 1-minute updates for tilt 1 (adding about a minute to the time it takes to do a full volume scan, but putting data more immediately useful to end users out much more frequently).

Going a step further, more bandwidth would open the door to a fairly cheap upgrade to the radar arrays themselves... they could mount a second antenna back-to-back with the current one with fixed tilt (ideally at 10cm, like the main one, but possibly 5cm like TWDR if 10cm spectrum isn't available, or a second dish of the proper size for 10cm wouldn't fit), and do some moderate hardware and software tweaks that would effectively increase their tilt-1 scanrate to one every 6-10 seconds (because every full rotation of the main antenna would give them a full tilt-1 rotation off the back). This means they could send out raw tilt-1 data with 6-10 second frequency. It's not quite realtime, but it would be a HUGE improvement over what we have now.

Unfortunately, NWS has lots of bureaucracy, and a slow funding pipeline. I think it's safe to say that the explosion in popularity of personal radar apps, combined with mobile broadband, almost totally caught them by surprise. Ten years ago, very few people outside NWS were calling for large-scale NEXRAD upgrades. Now, with abundant Android and IOS apps & 5mbps+ mobile data the norm, demand is surging.

That said, I hope they DON'T squander a chunk of cash on public datafeed bandwidth instead of upgrading their backhaul. I'd rather see them do the back-end upgrades that only THEY can do, and tell people who want reliable & frequent upgrades to get their data feed through a private mirror service (like allisonhouse or caprockweather) who can upgrade their own backhaul as needed, instead of having to put in funding requests years in advance.

You have it wrong. The third-world products are mostly UN-encumbered. It's the products meant for sale in the US, Japan, and Europe that end up gimped and crippled into proprietary uselessness.

Correction: be able to stream local content, not be locked to Google, and be both rootable & reflashable so it won't end up in landfills like the Revue and original Nexus Q did.

That's why double-gang divided NEMA boxes and conduit exist. Build the plastic box and conduit into the furniture, ship it with both ends covered by screw-on plates, and leave it up to the end users to wire it as they please (a pair of outlets, a single-gang outlet plus a low-voltage keystone, or whatever).

With a divided double-gang box fed by separate 1/2" conduits, you can run just about anything. At the other end of one conduit, they could put a 15A 120v RV-type "inlet", like this one: http://inverterservicecenter.com/Marinco-150BBIW.RV (if you wanted to wire both gangs for power, instead of using one for ethernet/fiber/whatever, you'd pull out the box divider at the outlet end and feed both from the same conduit). Carlon ENT conduit is perfect for this purpose ( http://www.tnb.com/ps/endeca/index.cgi?a=nav&N=3819+601+3818 ). Worst-case, they could use Hubbell's funky JLOAD single-gang multimedia outlets, which pair a single 120v power outlet with a pair of low-voltage keystones, designed for use with a special box that shields the high-voltage power away from the low-voltage wiring. ( http://www.cesco.com/b2c/product/447768 )

That's part of the reason why FEC (Florida East Coast Railroad) has never been actively *hostile* towards passenger trains, compared to railroads like CSX(*). FEC runs mile-long trains hauling limestone at 60mph on glass-smooth welded-rail tracks that are maintained to higher standards than some stretches of track in the NEC itself. FEC's one non-negotiable mandate for voluntary passenger service on their tracks has always been that someone else had to pay to lay down a second track, maintain it to FEC's no-compromise high standards, and equip every train that runs on them with in-cab signaling and the kind of automation rarely found outside of Japan(**).

Once Amtrak, Florida, and a federal funding act or two cleared the way for the feds to pay most of the bulk cost of double-tracking FEC from Jacksonville to Miami, FEC announced that Amtrak was welcome with open arms (Amtrak itself is still trying to scrape up funding for the trainsets themselves, or come up with a good way to split & join NY-Florida trains in Jacksonville so half can proceed straight down the east coast to Miami, and the other half can run to Orlando & Tampa (historically, Amtrak has always resisted splitting/joining trains anywhere besides an endpoint).

(*)About 15 years ago, FDOT approached CSX with a request to double-track it from Auburndale to Tampa for Tampa-Miami passenger rail. CSX refused. FDOT offered to TRIPLE-track it... and CSX still refused. Exasperated, FDOT offered to elevate a ~12 mile segment running through Lakeland, and CSX told them that the only way they'd voluntarily allow it is if FDOT agreed to let CSX refund the purchase price and demolish it at will if it later decided that the support columns or track structure were in the way of whatever they felt like doing. That was the turning point when FDOT decided that any future rail route between Orlando and Tampa simply *had* to run along I-4 instead of CSX... CSX was impossible to deal with in any sane way, and taking the corridor via eminent domain would have ended up costing more than building it down the middle of I-4 instead (I-4 was planned for complete reconstruction over the next 10-20 years anyway, and FDOT owned a fairly wide corridor that was straight and flat, so they just designed the empty space into the new road and bridges so it would be there when the day came to build the new tracks).

(**)FEC is a HUGE proponent of cross-training and automation, and because it operates entirely within a single state, it can get away with telling its union to go to hell over things that would get CSX crucified. For example, FEC requires all engineers and conductors to be cross-trained and capable of serving either role as needed (sensible and efficient, but *vehemently* opposed by railroad unions because it means the conductor can operate the train while the engineer takes a break, instead of having to staff a second engineer while the conductor twiddles his thumbs). I believe it also requires engineer-conductors to have college degrees.