Weather Radio (emergency notification) question

[Kristofor]

Well, I rarely have local TV/Radio on anymore and we're back into a severe weather season so I've been considering picking up a storm notification radio.

I understand that there are now models that can be set to only sound an alert for your own county and only for a warning not a watch. My question is are you also able to tell it that you only want to hear about tornado warnings and not thunder storms?

Finally, does anyone have any recomendations on brands/models? My initial intention on this one is for a device that stays in my house, but I do camp quite a lot so a portable model that can also run off of AC may also be a good idea.

Thanks for any help,
Kristofor.

[maxparot]

Since you are obviously already online if you use a cable or DSL connection my suggestion would be to download and set up weatherbug. It alarm you to weather bulletins and you can set the conditions for your zipcode. Saves the price of a radio.

[sacherjj]

You want to get a radio with S.A.M.E. technology. That allows you to only have alerts go off for your and surrounding counties.

I purchased this model off of Amazon. I've been pretty happy with it.

[Kristofor]

Max, I do user the firefox plugin forecast-fox which also displays warnings, but there are a couple issues with this. When the power goes out my equipment is on UPS for ~30 minutes, but in the past I have almost always lost my network link at that point until the power is back up. The other issue is that
when I'm sleeping I sleep hard, I don't want to try and crank up the volume on my PC to the point were it could wake me up from 2 rooms away each day.

Joe, I had looked at that model and a couple others earlier, but missed the one review (out of like 50) that specifically stated that the alarm could be turned off for everything except tornado warnings, hurricane warnings (how does one of these sneak up on you?), and biological hazard warnings. That sounds like exactly what I want. No need to head to the basement in the middle of the night for a little hail.

Thanks for the recommendation.


Kristofor.

[sacherjj]

Joe, I had looked at that model and a couple others earlier, but missed the one review (out of like 50) that specifically stated that the alarm could be turned off for everything except tornado warnings, hurricane warnings (how does one of these sneak up on you?), and biological hazard warnings. That sounds like exactly what I want. No need to head to the basement in the middle of the night for a little hail.

You can basically work through the list of all the alerts and turn on or off those you don't want. I didn't realize so many things were sent via this system. Chemical Spills, Amber Alerts, etc. It also allows you to program single County or multiple Counties regions. The only fault is that you can't turn the keypress beep off (so it isn't useful for an alarm clock) and the viewing angle on the LCD isn't the greatest. But it works well and aparently suffers from false alarms less than others.