I have both the yellow portable Midland weather radio and the silver portable Oregon Scientific weather radio and I MUCH prefer the Oregon Scientific one. I've used it for at least two years now and I've found it reliable and easy to remember how to program it. The midland requires me to open up the manual everytime I want to work with it - I hate that.

The other nice thing about the Oregon Scientific radio is that it will work both as a portable (w/ batteries) and as a desktop (plugged in and resting in a slightly larger cradle for better stability.

I both both from http://www.ambientweather.com and they provided a great selection and good service.

Ken

Some time ago I purchased a very cheap (as in crude) little carabiner radio because it picked up weather radio stations. It looked like this: http://www.sz-wholesale.com/uploadFiles/20050316145415909.jpg

I've never seen one that small before or since, but it just stopped working one day so I tossed it. I wanted to get another one, remove the circuit board, and install it in another container (like a tic-tac box or something maybe) but I can't find them anymore except for websites that want you to buy lots of them wholesale...

I agree. I've had my midland for several years, and I have trouble remembering how to use it every year when I go camping. And I'm no slouch technically. The worst was when the temperature dipped below 32 degrees and it started going berserk. Geeze, I know it's cold, you don't have to wake me up to tell me that. The "freeze alarm" wasn't even in the manual, I had to look it up online. And it was something like up-down-up-down-left-right-A-B-A-B to turn it off.

I'll have to see if I can get the Oregon Scientific within a week, before my next trip.

HAHAHA - I wonder if anyone else picked up on the old school Nintendo reference

Contra FTW! One of the best ever!

OK, just got back from my camping trip. Turns out it's been so long since I used my Midland radio, the batteries had leaked a little. Unfortunately, it hadn't leaked enough to ruin it, so I didn't have an excuse to replace it immediately.

After puzzling over it for about 15 minutes, I was able to remember how to set it up the way I want. Luckily, I remembered that it comes pre-set with the 2 alarms set for 6am and 7am, and figured out quickly how to turn them off. I remember the first time I used it getting woken up from my nice cozy sleeping bag way too early, twice! I couldn't remember how to turn off the freeze alarm, but there was no chance of that on this trip.

So, KenK, exactly which model of the Oregon Scientific do you have? There appear to be several models with the same case, and some on Amazon are getting rotten ratings, and some are getting great ratings. It puts me back into indecision paralysis.

My weather radio is the Oregon Scientific WR103NX.

According to http://www.ambientweather.com/radiosnoaa.html that model was replaced by the WR601 for $31.14 + shipping. The WR601 looks just like my WR103NX. I don't see any obvious differences in the description, but I'm sure there's a difference.

I would like the temperature feature in the WR113. Actually I wish they had not only temperature, but also min/max temperature readings. I really like to know how cold it got at night when camping.

Your post reminded me that I still need to remove the batteries after my last use. I try to do that for all battery-powered gear. Not worth the risk of not doing so.

Yah, my Midland has a temperature display, and I use it.

Thanks!

After reading this thread, I seem to be in the minority here, but I'm not a huge fan of weather radio alarms, even with SAME coding.

A county can be an awfully big place and you're going to get woken up in the middle of the night fairly often for weather that's happening far, far away. Where I live, the city has "air raid" sirens for warning about imminent weather alerts and those suit my purposes just fine.

Bottom line is you're going to get a lot of false alarms and these things can be insanely loud. If something bad is happening locally around bedtime, we're already sleeping in the basement.

I agree, I always leave the alert feature off. They're great for getting weather forecasts when you're disconnected from the internet.