By Bob W9DXR
With the upcoming weather spotting season, this article we recently unearthed is very timely. My wife recently came across a newspaper clipping from around 1959 that her family had kept. At that time the use of black and white television was still predominant and I believe the following method of tornado detection worked best with a black and white TV (you do remember those don’t you?) on an outdoor antenna.
I can attest that the Weller method did work for detecting lightning and strong storms. There is enough energy at 54 Mhz (approximately channel 2) in a lightning storm to trigger a TV screen to turn white and flicker with the energy. Although it was somewhat crude it worked well. Fortunately I was never close enough to a tornado to see my screen turn completely white. Today we have digital TV and cable in place so we are stuck watching the weather channel or a weather app on our smart phone. Ahh… the good old days.