DEFCON 88 wrote:
OK, this isn't about SW, but I figured some of you would have
experience with weather alert radios.

None at all in my case. I had weather radios when I lived in the US, but
they did not have the alerts yet.


I'm looking for a good tabletop S.A.M.E. weather alert radio that can
be configured to receive only the type of alerts I want to hear. For
example, I don't want the radio to be triggered by amber alerts. Most
of the reviews and specs I've found online don't say if specific
alerts can be blocked. I don't care if it receives AM/FM broadcasts or
not.

That leads to:

http://www.weather.gov/alerts-beta/

The US government provides weather alerts as RSS feeds. RSS feeds for those
that don't know are a way of letting your web browser know when a website is
updated.

For example, everytime a new topic is posted on a busy discussion list,
I use a program called RSS2Email which sends me an email.

Obviously, the same thing can be done with weather RSS feeds too.

Email is just an example, depending upon how good you are at scrounging
programs or services or writing your own, you can have a weather alert sent
to your cell phone, your pager, ring a bell in the house etc.

Some RSS gateway programs allow filtering so that only some things are
sent to you. In this case a storm warning for two counties west of you would
not be of any interesting unless it is moving east.

While a weather radio is small portable and relatively foolproof, and any
internet based application is not, it may be a useful thing to add to
your information sources.

I found this with a quick web search, it looks like other weather information
providers also have RSS alerts.

Geoff.


--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.