Good weather radio suggestions?

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97tbird

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During the tornado week in NC, i was @ work and my wife was @ home, huddled in the bathroom with no power, and the only communication she had was looking online for alerts/warnings on her blackberry smart phone and me calling/texting her with updates as soon as i could see a warning on/off, etc...
She was safe, and the power came back after about 6 hrs and we were safe from tornadoes.

but what if cell phone service was also out? what if i wasn't able to communicate with her? with all the neighbors in our town house complex gone, she'd have been alone that night with no way to know when tornado warnings started/expired.

So i thought we should get a weather radio! preferably a battery AND solar power operated or hand cranked.
S.A.M.E (so you can choose a specific county/counties that you need the alerts for, and not having to listen to all alerts in the country!) and NOAA are must have features. I know some of them have led flsah lights and cell phone charges, etc, too...

I looked at some models online but don't know really which brands/models are known to be dependable and good bang for the $$...

So if anyone has any experiences with weather radios, i'd like your input. Thanks in adv.
 
I can't really comment on specific brands, but one thing must be mentioned: even NOAA weather radio is not immune to blackouts or outages. In fact, that's one of the potential causes for the high number of fatalities in Alabama last week as some of the transmitters were knocked out and warnings from the Birmingham NWS office weren't broadcast.
 
Wouldn't a regular portable radio work in this case? Aren't the warnings broadcast on all regular radio stations?

I have a $5 battery operated radio that I've owned as part of my hurricane preparedness kit when I was living in Miami area. Not solar and no crank, but it'll last a whole day on 3 AA batteries. So as long as you have some spare batteries laying around, you should be set. These weather conditions outages don't last forever.
 
EAS messages get kind of on top of each other. I work in TV and when a cell of thunderstorms move through, each new county gets a warning good for the next twenty minutes or so. The memory of the little decoder/reencoder gets confused when the messages interrupt each other.

I would just get a good old school police scanner; you can find ones that run on batteries, and the frequencies on google. They also get weather radio frequencies, but so much more. You can get scanners on ebay all the time for cheap after volunteer firefighters quit, etc.

Even if your local PD has "trunked" service and is hard to pick up, often the "statewide" channel may be in the clear.
 
If you're really concerned about severe weather, a scanner is actually a fabulous idea because you can get local skywarn repeater output, as well as NOAA weather radio. Skywarn is a volunteer organization of trained weather spotters that has a coordinated radio network, so you'd be able to listen to weather spotters/chasers in the immediate area.

Pete's idea of a regular AM/FM radio, in addition to a weather radio, is a good idea. In large scale severe weather situations, local radio stations usually provide full time coverage of warnings and information pertaining to the event.
 
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I picked up a good flashlight/weatherband/AM/FM thing from work, hand cranked, and solar. Works really well, and was only $30. Oh, can also charge cell phones with a USB cord.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Et%26%23243%3Bn+-+American+Red+Cross+Microlink+FR160+AM/FM/NOAA+Radio+with+Hand+Crank/2317153.p?id=1218325541475&skuId=2317153&st=weather%20radio&cp=1&lp=8
 
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While we do not have NOAA alert broadcasts here up north, I typically rely on a Blaine location (call sign: KAD93) NOAA broadcast to my Midland NOAA Weather radio (WR100 to be exact) for windstorms,tsunami warnings, etc.

It's been very reliable so far.

Q.
 
Look up the CC Radio Plus by CCrane. Has AM, FM, 2M & weather alert. It's powered by 4 D batteries, which will last a very long time. Excellent audio quality. The 2M band will give you access to weather spotter reports being called in when a weather net is activated.

I've had mine for 10 yrs and highly recommend it.
 
Originally Posted By: sleddriver
Look up the CC Radio Plus by CCrane. Has AM, FM, 2M & weather alert. It's powered by 4 D batteries, which will last a very long time. Excellent audio quality. The 2M band will give you access to weather spotter reports being called in when a weather net is activated.

I've had mine for 10 yrs and highly recommend it.


That is PERFECT!!! It has everything one needs. I think Skywarn repeaters broadcast in the 2 m amateur band (as well as other bands). So you'd have NOAA radio, skywarn, and local HAM. I think I may actually pick one of these up.
 
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No, it's not cheap. But it is built well, and does a lot of things right and CCrane is a great company to deal with. They recently refur'b my unit (display & button issues) at no charge.

You can also use rechargeable D batteries in it, it will power an external light, it has an excellent AM front end, but you can also add an external AM antenna. It also has an AUX in jack where you can hook up your mp3/ipod/etc. and play music, audiobooks through it when you don't want to mess with headphones.

I have a Ham license and our key weather nets are conducted on the 2M band. Since I have the older model, I just use my Icom HT set on scan mode. But having this integrated into the radio was a great idea.
 
http://www.schaffrath.net/weatheradio-12-250.html

It's not being sold anymore, but this is the model we've been using for the last 8 years. Programming the thing was non-intuitive and somewhat of a pain, but it's worked exactly as intended since then. The SAME feature only triggers an alert for weather affecting the county we live in, and we've got it set to trigger for only tornado warnings and severe thunderstorm warnings. It's never failed to alert, and goes off 15-20 seconds before the same alerts come across on broadcast television and radio. It's twice awoken us (the alert warble is impossible to ignore) in the middle of the night and allowed us to get to the basement when we otherwise would have just continued to sleep.
 
I'd want cheap and robust. Nothing like a digital display or circuit board to go bad.

I have a Sony ICF 36 weather radio and it is great.

I can understand the desire to have something monitoring and get the beacon of incoming bad weather. Can't help you there...
 
years ago i bought two midland wr-100. one picked up semi good and the other one , you had to touch the antenna to hear anything. i took it back to universal radio in columbus and it did not pick up anything in columbus either. i bought a reecom r-1630 and it picked up a very strong signal. i live in a valley. i bought another reecom for my mom. that one also picks up great. if sangean had one out at the time i wouldn't hesitate to pick one up. i own a sangean ats-909 shortwave and it is a little gem. i had a display issue with it and customer service was great. the guy that worked on it called me at home from california to tell me he was about to ship it back. got a brand new in the box radio after 2 years of use. what ever you get, it has to have a battery back up or it is worthless because your electric will go off during a nasty storm. i'm sure most of today's models have that feature.
 
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