Have the wr400 at home for years now and am happy with it. Spend the time to set it up properly so it only alarms when really needed.

If i had a gripe, the battery backup doesn't do well with eneloops but its no biggie to swap out. They should include a setting for rechargeable batteries but its not a deal breaker for me.

I don't mean to hijack your thread but if you have an active amateur radio group around you it might work out for you to get one of the cheap Baofeng radios and listen to the local weather nets on it. You will have to download Chirp and load some frequencies but it is not too hard. Then you will hear the weather advisories before the weather service broadcasts them.  

In my area NWS reps are up on the nets and spotters that are mobile report realtime conditions on the ground. You aren't supposed to transmit without a license but if you saw a tornado about to touch down they might get over it.

Just something else to think about.

D

The best weather alert radio by far is the Reecom brand, the basic model is the R-1630.

It does things that no other alert radio does and some things that only a few let you do.

It has selectable county or multiple counties for warning areas.

It has selectable types of alerts. You can turn off amber alerts and other annoyances.

It is the only one (AFAIK) that properly responds to the "End Of Message" data burst, so it turns off after the alert is played. Every other one just continues playing for 5 minutes or whatever.

It has AA batteries for backup in case of power outage, and the batteries last a long time. The Midlands I had would run batteries down very rapidly if the power was out, which isn't all that uncommon during severe weather events out in the country.

The signal reception is pretty good, noticeably better than the Midlands I had.

That is impressive. Thank you for this tip, never heard of a serious midland competitor (not that they are amazing)
For under $40 and tornado season, i ordered one and will run it head to head just for fun.


Thanks for the info friend

+1 on the Reecom.

I think it's now out of production but Midland made an ultraportable basic weather radio, the RA36451 or HH50B, that's great for
EDC carry/camping/whatever if you can find one.

I've wondered if one could buy a fire pager and set it for the single warning tone. You'd get every alert, but it's certainly portable. Some LMR handheld radios will do 2-tone paging also, some might be able to be programmed for the single NOAA alert tone. Beofengs AFAIK do not do 2-tone paging.

Lots of scanners have weather alert capability, in addition to CB's with weather tracking.

+1 on Reecom.

I could swear the Midland WR120 does as well. I seem to recall it cutting out right at the data burst. I know my other one (forget the band) doesn't, because after alerts, the midland stops and the other one plays for ~5 minutes.

Midlands are solid and work. If it has SAME it will work fine.