Those weather radios

I found one of those $40 automatic weather radios at a garage sale for $4 and snapped it up. I don't think it had been used.

The basic idea is that you can turn it on to hear the NOAA weather forecast, or let it automagically come on with an alert if a warning/watch is issued.

This works because in addition to transmitting audio that humans hear, NOAA transmits data that consumer (and emergency services) radio gear listens for. This data includes a few things:

1. the type of hazard (tornado, freeze, volcano, nuclear, chemical, etc)
2. expiration time
3. the county affected by the alert, identified by a SAME code.

If you opt for the alerts you can either say "trigger the radio when it receives any alert" or "trigger the radio when it receives any alert in the counties I have defined." I plugged in the Dallas and Collin county codes and, as designed, it was triggered by the severe thunderstorm watch this afternoon. Good stuff, Maynard.

If you haven't picked up one of these I'd say it works well and is worth the time/money. If you are frugal or economically challenged you can grab one used off craigslist, eBay, or (like me) a garage sale. If you have one and haven't programmed in the SAME codes, I'd encourage you to do it: it's only painful once, as long as you have a battery backup in there.