I've always thought that having a good NOAA-AllHazard radio was about as important as having a fire extinguisher, smoke detector, CO detector, and the _Local_ phone numbers for the police and fire departments (one family not to far from where we used to live lost their house when lightning started a fire at their house AND took down the county 911 service, if they had the direct phone number for the fire house down the road the dammage would not have been complete)
Anyway, I've gone through several varieties of radios over the years at the National Weather Service augmented their EAS system, including many really cool functions. First a transition to computer read voices, then addition of 1050Hz tone to automatically open squelch on the radios to report the warning, then SAME county encoding, and now radios that can react to all that, but also allow the user to supress some warnings they know they are not concernted about. Even with SAME code, my radio would go off when there was coastal flooding announced, being at 100 feet elevation near the center of the land-mass, it was not a concern of mine at 4am.
I recently upgraded to a Midland WR-300 (silver, just like below) from a MIdland WR-100. I love being able to supress warnings I'm not too worried about based on my location. A guy at work tracked down this link, it's nearly half what I spent, but it's a cammo case (we're hams, in 5 minutes we'll have the case off anyway, and I'll bet we also have spray paint right nearby too) Put it next to a plant, and it'll blend right in to the scenery.
http://www.buy.com/prod/midland-wr301-clock-radio-lcd/q/loc/111/20790712...
So if you're interested, pick one up, maybe I'll do a quick talk about them at an upcoming meeting, there are lots of choices, and it's worth understanding, specially since the AARC has such an active SkyWarn presence!
GlennB
