Ok, another thread - the one about my storm experience - led to some thoughts about buying a weather radio again.
The Midland WR-300 was touted as a good radio, so I downloaded the user manual. It might be a good radio, but it's a usability disaster area. Which made me think a bit - WHY are the user interfaces for pretty much ALL weather radios so bad? WHY aren't we using the big fat happy GUI we have in front of our face to program these devices rather than struggling with the horrendous multi-modal and dog-butt ugly lcd displays of these devices.

Here's how I'd love to see these things work.

1. The device has a USB mini-connector and, oh, 4MB or 8MB of local storage. Something cheap.

2. To program your radio you go to the manufacturer's web site and you get a lovely GUI that lets you find and set your S.A.M.E codes, your preferred alerting levels and methods, maybe set a few other device variables - and then you hit "submit" and they email you a special text file.

3. Using the USB connection, you connect the device to your machine, it shows up as another disk, and you copy your config file to your device.

4. The text file "config.txt" is a simple, human-readable set of configuration options that the radio reads and uses to set itself up.

They are selling MP3 players with direct USB connections for $9 - it's not like it's a huge expense for the hardware side:

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q...&sa=title#p

And an embedded linux is free - there's no licensing costs at all.

Any Radio engineers out there? This is a product that could be made for like $40 a unit and I bet could sell for $90 to $100.

I don't know if they offer this in your area Martin, but until someone makes a better weather radio -

A local TV station has a service whereby you sign up, leave a contact phone number and address and if severe weather is spotted in your area, you get a call. Not forecast, not watches, warnings only.

Worked like a charm the time funnel clouds were spotted in the area. As recently as yesterday I got a call about a severe TStorm in the area. Best of all, it's free.

Between that and weatherbug I usually am warned about weather in a timely manner.

And I know I would buy a radio like the one you describe. It's too simple is what it is.

Boy, I would have liked it if this idea was in production when I was gifting weather radios. I could have generated the text file for each household and had them up and running in no time.

If you are OK with a weather radio that does NOT have SAME technology (where you identify the specific county/region SAME code(S) that you want the radio to alert for), then ...

The Midland HH50/51 Pocket Weather Alert Radio is about the smallest and simplest weather radio available right now.

It has four buttons/switches:

On the right side it has a sliding switch with three settings: OFF, ON (radio plays), and ALERT (radio off, but alarm sounds and radio comes on if an alert is sent).

When you slide the switch to ON (or ALERT) the radio scans and selects the strongest weather alert signal. If channel reception is poor, make sure antenna is fully deployed.

On the left side it has three buttons:
Top - Test/Channel Rescan button
Middle - Volume Up
Bottom - Volume Down

Test/Channel Rescan button details:
---With radio in ALERT mode, press & hold for 3 seconds to start the alarm siren. Press again to stop the the siren.

---With the radio in ON mode, press & hold for 1 second to have the radio rescan for the strongest weather alert signal.

BTW, the HH51 is the camo version, so if you drop it while in the woods Midland gets to sell you a new one. Nice feature! (just kidding ... I guess hunters like their camo ... I wish there were a yellow or orange version to make it that much easier to find).

On a completely different slant, have you seen the Logitech Harmony universal remote controls? I have a Harmony 880 (they've hopefully improved the charger base contacts and now sell the 890 model) and it is set up EXACTLY as you describe.

You log into the Logitech Harmony web site, tell it what kind of gear you have (it must have an AMAZING list of potential gear, because it had everything I have - even my old dusty Kenwood receiver from the early 90's.

It asks if it needs some extra information it just asks - like which TV video port the DVD player is plugged into

It offers a standard suggested setup, then you can go to town customizing it as you wish using fairly well-written guides (I use the default but did play a bit one time), and then when done you connect the remote to the PC using a USB cord and press Download to download the settings.

It is really very well done. Since you log in, it remembers your gear and settings so you don't have to redo it all if you want to make a change - like when you buy a new TV.

They're not cheap, but they are VERY well thought out. I couldn't recommend them more.

From the web page for the 890: "From laser disc to Blu-Ray® disc, find your components in our 175,000-device database."


Definitely not cheap. Sounds pretty nifty though.

I totally agree with you. I hate mine, even with the owner's manual, half the time I can't figure the stupid thing out - so it sits in the basement. Real useful, huh?

On the other hand, I've been a Unix/Linux programmer for more than a few years. I might have to play around with this...

As far as I can tell, it's nothing more or less complex in terms of file structure than a text config file like we use for, oh, a bazillion things in Linux land.

The embedded controller would simply read the config file from the USB mass storage, stuff the EEPROM with the variables, and that's it.

I have a Midland WR-300, and while I believe it is a great radio among its peers it is quite a Charlie Foxtrot when it comes to configuration/use. It seems like it was enginered to an alarm clock/weather radio which turned out to be mediocre at both, and then got rushed to market.

I'll be monitoring this thread for progress on the Doug Ritter WR1* until it is available for purchase.

On a serious note; is there a WR out there that will output alert events to a computer via USB? If such a thing exists, it would be no effort at all to filter/customize the information delivery through a PC.


*I'm totally making up the name, please don't shoot me.

If your going to run the output of a WR through a pc then you might as well just eliminate the WR, just go to the noaa site and subscribe to the e-mail or use a tool like wget to scrape the page.