Posted: 1/8/2008 12:59:37 PM EDT
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First let me start by saying that as a born Northerner nothing in this world makes me wet my pants and scream like a little girl more than a tornado or anything related to a tornado such as tornado sirens, funnel clouds, and I have even been known to dribble a drop or two in my boxers during high winds. So when I moved here I purchased a weather alert radio to hopefully someday bring on a weather related panic/shit my pants attack. I bought a Midland WR100 that has something called SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding) technology to prevent false alarms to events out of my area. My questions are..... 1) During the 12pm Wednesday tests is my alarm supposed to go off? I have never once heard this thing go off. 2) Does anyone else here have one of these? Are they pretty reliable? 3) Is there any way to test these to insure they are programed properly and set up to save your ass? |
I can't answer all of your questions but I can tell you that I have a Radio Shack programmable weather radio and it doe's NOT go off during the weekly tests. I would guess that yours works the same. |
Thank you. I would assume they all work on the same signals. |
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I'm similar to you (born and raised in W. Pa and moved to SW Ohio 10 years ago). This tornado crap is nuts! About 7 years ago, a tornado hit northern hamilton country and missed our house by about 250 yards. Killed 4 people, leveled a whole neigborhood and made a real mess of things. I was up, heard it and never want to be close to one again. Becuase of that, when we built our new house 4 years ago, we have a concrete walled and covered storm room/bunker underground. I purchased that very same weather radio for a bunch of family members for Christmas. I set up my mom and dad's as well as a few others that we gave away so I'm kinda familir with it. here is a link to the Midland website for more info and the manual to download. 1) If I remember correctly, the alarm doesn't go off during the wednesday test, but it will apear as a message on the screen. you might want to confirm that in the book. 2) I don't have one for us (we have the WR300), but the WR-300 has been reliable for the past year. We have had a Radio Shack model since the tornado I mentioned and it worrked fine, but I read about the WR-300last year and decided to try it. It offers the ability to disable certain alarm types so that you don't get those messages (ie. flood watches. We live on top of a hill, right at the intercection of 3 counties and we would get flood watchs in the middle of the night from the old radio and get woken up for no reason.). Of course, last year was the draught summer so we have very few storms to try it out with (thank God) so I kept the old radio shack and the new midland in our bedroom until i was confident that the new one would work as well as the old and filter the messages the way I expected it to. so far so good. 3) IM me if you have specific questions after you read the manual. Basically, follow the link on the website to the NOAA/NWS site, find the SAME code for your county(s) you want to get alerted for, enter that and then decide which style of alarm you want... Check it out and let me know. |
You must have lived real close to me. That morning of hell was in April of 1999. |
Symmes Twp and it was ugly. |
Cornell Road near Sycamore's soccer field. |
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My weather radio...and I believe it is a Radio Shack SAME model, does audibly alert during the noon Wednesday test. Maybe I had the option of programming it to be silent during the weekly test, but I can't remember. Mine works pretty well. I only have it do the audible alert for Severe Thunderstorms and Tornadoes. dvo |
damn you were much closer than me. it came about 200 - 250 years from our house after it hopped over to our area after hitting your area |
We were lucky, we only got mild roof, window and car damage. The worse damage was about 1/4 mile west of us and northeast in your direction. But it was still a hell of a morning. |
I remember hearing the roar (I live down near Kenwood Town Center mall). The wife and kids were in the basement, but I looked and the radar and saw the worst was nearly over and went back upstairs to bed. That would have been a bad decision about a mile or two north of me. |