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.