The New Weather Radios

NOAA Weather Radio is a valuable tool in keeping up with the weather. In recent times, the U.S. Government has produced a new system that greatly enhances the way weather radios are capable of reporting. That system uses technology known as "Specific Area Message Encoder" (SAME). In addition to its usual weather bulletins, NOAA now sends bulletins from the U.S. Emergency Alert System and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. These additional bulletins might include, for example, toxic chemical incidents and hazardous explosions and fires.

Until SAME came along, you generally listened to NOAA Weather Radio on a scanner or other radio that would tune the 162 MHz band, or you could buy a weather radio that remained quiet until NOAA sent a tone to open the radio's squelch and announce threatening weather.

The broadcasts often covered a several-county area. So, tone-alert radios encompassed a large coverage area and reported on all types of watches and warnings. A "watch" only indicates the "possibility" of severe weather. You might be awakened at 3 a.m. to be told that there was a "Severe Thunderstorm Watch" or a "Flash Flood Warning" two counties away from your location. Over time, this became unacceptable to many people - if not most. An untold number of tone-alert radios were unplugged and put on the shelf.

With the SAME technology, NOAA now broadcasts a series of digital codes along with the alert tone. With the proper receiver, you can set the radio to respond to alerts only in one or more counties. The county-specific coding is quite simple, with a six-digit code. (The leading zero position is reserved to provide single-digit codes to subdivide large counties.) Code 48 is Texas. Code 147 is Fannin County, Texas. So, the code 048147 selects only weather alerts that pertain specifically to Fannin County, Texas. The code 048277 is specifically for Lamar County, Texas. And so on.

Radio Shack has a SAME receiver, Model 12-249, which has sold so well that a local dealer is out of stock and says he has had customers from as far away as Minnesota call to see if he had one in stock! The Radio Shack receiver allows you to select only one county, or up to 15 counties, from which to receive alerts.

But incredibly, so far as I can determine, no manufacturer of consumer-grade weather radios has implemented the decoding of the second set of SAME codes. These additional codes would allow the user to select which type of weather alert they want their radio to decode.

As it is now, when NOAA broadcasts an alert it includes all the following that are applicable to a specific covered area:

Tornado Warning

Severe Thunderstorm Warning

Flash Flood Warning

Tornado Watch

Severe Thunderstorm Watch

Hurricane/Tropical Storm Watch

Hurricane/Tropical Storm Warning

National Emergency (declared by the President)

In some cases, additional message are sent as part of an alert - among them are Flash Flood Watch, High Wind Warning, River Flood Watch, and River Flood Warning.

A "Warning" means that the particular weather hazard is imminent or has been reported.

A "Watch" means that the particular hazard is possible - that the conditions are more favorable than usual for it to happen.

Remember that the SAME codes are being sent (NOAA confirmed this to me) that would allow a person to select which of these Watches and Warnings he or she wanted to awakened by in the middle of the night, for example. Suppose you don't live anywhere near a river, you don't plan to be driving at 2 a.m., and you never have had flash flooding that threatened homes in your area. Maybe you don't want to be awakened by Watches of any kind, since they are quite frequent and always followed by a Warning if real trouble develops. You then might want to set you radio to awaken you only to tell you if there is a Tornado Warning or a severe Thunderstorm Warning in your county, or in your county and an adjoining county, or if there is a national emergency.

Finally, a weather-radio system we can live with. One that would no doubt save lives - prevent a lot of hail-damage to vehicles which could be brought under cover - and save a lot of sleep. But - nobody makes one for the consumer market! This is all the more amazing considering the press releases from NOAA, from which I quote in part:

"We want to reduce the 'Boy Who Cried Wolf' syndrome by targeting our alarms for specific segments of the listening area," says Louis J. Boezi, The National Weather Service's deputy director for modernization.

".... because it (SAME) lets NOAA Weather Radio listeners screen out the severe weather alarms they don't want to hear."

"....feature that allows consumers to choose only the official NWS watches and warnings they want."

Why has nobody produced a consumer receiver that will do what the U.S. Government clearly intended when they developed the SAME technology? A good question that deserves an answer.

I sent e-mails to the major makers and to the primary retail vendor of consumer-grade weather radios and to NOAA inquiring about the availability of SAME radios, and about SAME radios that could decode not only the County codes, but also the Alert codes.

Maxon America, Inc., whose tone-alert and other radios are sold in various outlets, including ham-radio dealers, replied in part:

"I hope to have one in our product line in 1999." (No mention if it would decode both the County and Alert codes.)

Midland Consumer Radio, said in part:

"There are many other companies who will shortly market SAME receivers (ourselves included) but we will not release product details." (Understandable that they are not tipping their hand to competitors as to their new receivers.)

Oregon Scientific

A press release from Oregon Scientific indicates that they do not presently have a SAME weather radio in production, but that they plan to do so by the end of the year. No mention was made as to whether the SAME radio would decode both County and Alert codes. They currently have a desktop weather radio and a handheld version. The handheld (WR-8000) has some unique features, suited to use by campers and outdoors use. It is a tone-alert radio (but again, not SAME), has a compass, alarm clock, and a freeze-warning alert.

A Senior Buyer at Radio Shack responded in part:

"At this point, we feel that if the NWS feels its important enough to issue the alert to a specific county, then the radio should always alert. We have heard this request (editor: for alert-specific decoding) from various parts of the country and may consider it a feature in future radios. There are issues regarding liability, and what type of alerts the user should be allowed to select, and just how complicated such a device might be if we start adding all these programming capabilities. In a world where many people have trouble programming a VCR, I'm worried about making this life saving device too complicated. Having said that, let me repeat that we are looking at various options. None of these options would be anything that would happen in the near future."

All this confounds me, and many others. I think I have some standing to offer some comments. I have a law degree, am a former marketing director in a FORTUNE 500 company, former head of new-product development in a manufacturing company, wrote and edited software and tech manuals for years, and have been involved in ham-radio weather-watching nets for over 25 year. Perhaps just as important - I grew weary of being awakened at 3 a.m. by a radio that told me there was a Flash Flood Watch two counties away or a Severe Thunderstorm Watch in my county or any other county. I pulled the plug on my tone-alert Wx radio a couple of years ago! I now wait for the thunder to awaken me, as do many others.

Here are my responses to points raised or alluded to by the vendors:

If the NWS sends out the alert, then the consumer should get the whole alert:

Quoted earlier is clear and concise language from the National Weather Service that it was their intention in formulating the SAME standard that the consumer be afforded an opportunity to decide which alerts he or she wanted to hear. Is the industry blind to the clear intent of development of the system, which was driven by years of consumer complaints? Too often, companies build products that they think we need. They should build things that people tell them they want. Do companies not do market research? Have consumers grown so lazy or apathetic that they don't complain or express their desires?

Legal Liability:

If we have come to the point where a jury will award substantial damages to someone who is too inept to program a couple of sets of simple codes into a weather radio, we are in deep trouble. Please advise soonest the last time a consumer won a substantial judgement against Radio Shack, Midland, Maxon, Oregon Scientific, et al. because that consumer suffered some loss from incorrectly programming a piece of consumer electronics. Or - because they made a personal decision as to which codes he or she wanted to enter? Development and innovation are being choked by the paranoia of even the most remote of lawsuits.

Costs too much to make the county/alert receivers:

The cost for a chip that will decode both the county-specific and alert-specific codes should not cost much more than the chip Radio Shack put in its first SAME receiver - especially if it had been done in the first place with the development costs amortized over the many units already sold. At $79.95, Radio Shack apparently can't keep their SAME radio in stock. Properly merchandised, a lot of people would pay $90 or more for a radio that will give them peace of mind (with both county and alert-specific decoding) and let them sleep until a "real" weather threat comes up. I would pay $150 for such a radio - and I know I am not alone.

The dual-code SAME receivers might be too complex for end users:

Let's stop using the VCR as a whipping boy. It is trite. Anybody who cares to do so can program current VCRs - unless the instructions are very poor. Programming a full-featured SAME receiver would still be easier than programming many 200-channel scanners, a ham-radio mobile transceiver, half of the battery-operated clocks sold, digital watches, GPS receivers, and on and on. Let's not insult our customer's intelligence, make user-friendly interfaces (driven by real test customers, not engineers), and write good instruction manuals. If this "Oh, it may be too complicated" thinking carried over into other product lines, Radio Shack, for example, would never offer the all-digital phone/answer-machine/caller-ID/12 mailbox/voice-announce telephone (43-5814). That sucker is complicated - real complicated. But if you read the instructions, you can make it literally sit up and talk. But, you have to read the instructions, which is not too much to ask.

This newsletter is being sent, among others, to all the manufactures who are noted in the article, to the president of Radio Shack, to NOAA, and to Vice President Al Gore, who has been pushing for more use of weather radios.

If you would like to express your opinion on the lack of availability of SAME receivers that can decode both the County and Alert codes, please contact those listed below. Or, if you are happy with the radios now on the market, let them know. Also, I welcome an ongoing dialogue in this newsletter on the subject of weather radios and SAME radios in particular.

Mr. Leonard Roberts, President

Radio Shack

100 Throckmorton Street

Ft. Worth, TX 76102

www.radioshack.com

Mr. Mark D. Worthey

Maxon America, Inc.

10828 NW Air World Drive

Kansas City, MO 64153

www.maxonusa.com

mworthe@maxonusa.com

Mr. John Chass W0JLC

Midland Consumer Radio

1690 N. Topping

Kansas City, MO 64120

www.midlandradio.com

jonchass@tfs.net

Oregon Scientific

18383 SW Boones Ferry Road

Portland, OR 97224

www.oregonscientific.com

helpme@oscientific.com

Vice-President Al Gore

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, D.C. 20500

vice.president@whitehouse.gov

Public Affairs at NOAA

Barry.Reichenbaugh@noaa.gov

You can learn more about the NOAA SAME technology at:

www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/nwrsame.htm

All of the County codes for programming SAME receivers can be found at:

www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/indexnw.htm

Any person or organization is welcome to reprint this article. To obtain an .RTF version of the article by e-mail, write to rcr@gte.net - or save-to-disk the html code from the club Web site at:

http://web2.airmail.net/gf1/fcarc/

(This article was originally published in the May 1998 issue of The Repeater, the newsletter for the Fannin County, Texas ham-radio club.)

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Richard Rhodes

08/28/98