This day marked the 10th consecutive day for severe weather in CO, and after armchair chasing all week, I made room in my schedule to take a Saturday to go out for a solo chase close to home. I targeted Fort Morgan, CO. I had a laptop, my Garmin GPSMAP 295, my new Yaesu VX-8R HAM radio, and my cell phone with the really expensive but useful Verizon tethered data plan.
One goal today was to beta test my new gps map software for Linux. So far, it reads GPS data using gpsd from my gps device and plots my current position using openstreetmap GTK widgets. The GPS data and control boxes are displayed at the right. It supports logging GPS data to a file as well as updating SpotterNetwork automatically. The next step is to add radar data overlay, which I have just started prototying. A picture of the screen can be seen in the photos below.
Another part of my beta test was to test the gps logging functionality.
Apart from possibly being a little too frequent (I figure you can always
remove information, but you can't get it back) it seemed to work reasonably
well. The universal csv file was converted to kml using gpsbabel. Here's
a google map of this storm chase:
