We have a few weather radios in our house: one is in our emergency kit; two are builtin to some 2-way radios in the emergency kit; and two more are builtin to a pair of general use 2-way radios I have around the house. You’d think that would be enough, huh?
Nope. After the severe weather we had last week, I started my search for a weather radio/alarm that could wake us up in the middle of the night if something popped up we weren’t aware of. Since the last time I looked at these things, a few years ago, they have come out with a cool new feature called S.A.M.E. (Specific Area Message Encoder) which means the alarm will only go off for events in your county. A definite plus since I’d rather sleep when a severe thunderstorm is rolling through Champaign, for example. Even better yet, some of the radios/alarms today can even let you filter out certain alert types – I care about tornado warnings, but thunderstorm watches? Not so much..
For the curious, I ended up with the Reecom R-1650. It was delivered today and is now all configured. Once I get some backup batteries into it, I’ll move it upstairs to its resting place on my nightstand.
The Johnson Blog 
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2 responses to “New Weather Radio”
I bought a SAME weather radio this winter. Last Tuesday night it went off almost a dozen times. I don’t think ours can be set just for tornado warnings so we we’re getting awoke for thunderstorm and flash flood warnings as well as tornado warnings for eastern Sangamon County, that were no longer a danger to us.
I’m glad we have it, but I wish it could be set to just turn on the radio in the event of a warning, which is enough to wake me, rather than blasting the alarm for eight seconds first, which is enough to give me a heart attack and send my storm-fearing daughter into a total panic.
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In my morning haze, I read that as “I bought the SAME weather radio..” so I quickly checked the manual to make sure I was able to turn off the flood warning alarms. Whew, I can and I did already – it was late and my memory not all that great 🙂
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