(no subject)
Earlier I was over at Radio Shack (or The Shack... whatever) and noticed one of these on the shelf...
Radio Shack 12-519 Weather Radio with Skywarn Alert
So, for $99, you get this cute little gray plastic thing with stereo speakers which pulls in your usual AM/FM stations, can run completely on battery power (six AA cells), and also gets the NOAA weather broadcasts on 162.?? - 162.55 MHz... but then also has 20 programmable memory channels that can be anywhere in the ranges of 144.390* - 148, and 441 - 452 Mhz to catch ham radio traffic in the 2 meter and 70cm bands!
Wild. It even includes a jack to plug in an auxillary audio source, like an mp3 player or whatever.
Radio Shack is promoting this cute little thing as a means of directly receiving weather information from SKYWARN volunteers reporting via ham radio. Their scanners have had a Skywarn button for a while now, but this is on a far less specialized product. The instructions tell you to grab the local SKYWARN frequencies off radioreference.com.
I can't help but notice that Radio Shack is not attempting to promote the use of portable digital TV sets in an emergency. They do have a few models in stock, but they don't mention anything about using them in a storm or anything. I guess they, like myself, have given up on ATSC without a big-ass directional outdoor antenna that'll just blow away.
If I were to look at this from the outside looking in, well... I could say that listening in on the hurricane and weather 'nets' that take place on the radio here would be pretty informative.
Hello, radio.
Now, what's up with Radio Shack not carrying actual ham radio gear anymore? I mean, none of their stuff was particularly spectacular, but I did have a couple of their little mini handheld transcievers (the bitty ones that ran off two AA batteries) and those worked just fine and dandy. They were made by "Maycom", somewhere in South Korea.
* Leave the radio tuned to 144.390 only if you can decode 1200 baud AFSK data by ear. Otherwise, go decode it at openaprs.
Radio Shack 12-519 Weather Radio with Skywarn Alert
So, for $99, you get this cute little gray plastic thing with stereo speakers which pulls in your usual AM/FM stations, can run completely on battery power (six AA cells), and also gets the NOAA weather broadcasts on 162.?? - 162.55 MHz... but then also has 20 programmable memory channels that can be anywhere in the ranges of 144.390* - 148, and 441 - 452 Mhz to catch ham radio traffic in the 2 meter and 70cm bands!
Wild. It even includes a jack to plug in an auxillary audio source, like an mp3 player or whatever.
Radio Shack is promoting this cute little thing as a means of directly receiving weather information from SKYWARN volunteers reporting via ham radio. Their scanners have had a Skywarn button for a while now, but this is on a far less specialized product. The instructions tell you to grab the local SKYWARN frequencies off radioreference.com.
I can't help but notice that Radio Shack is not attempting to promote the use of portable digital TV sets in an emergency. They do have a few models in stock, but they don't mention anything about using them in a storm or anything. I guess they, like myself, have given up on ATSC without a big-ass directional outdoor antenna that'll just blow away.
If I were to look at this from the outside looking in, well... I could say that listening in on the hurricane and weather 'nets' that take place on the radio here would be pretty informative.
Hello, radio.
Now, what's up with Radio Shack not carrying actual ham radio gear anymore? I mean, none of their stuff was particularly spectacular, but I did have a couple of their little mini handheld transcievers (the bitty ones that ran off two AA batteries) and those worked just fine and dandy. They were made by "Maycom", somewhere in South Korea.
* Leave the radio tuned to 144.390 only if you can decode 1200 baud AFSK data by ear. Otherwise, go decode it at openaprs.