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Interesting when the alert came across I was in a dump truck hauling chip rock to ODOT in Salem I just reached up and punched the preset for a Corvallis station and went back to listening to music.
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I heard that alert today too. My wife happened to be in the car in front of me, listening to the radio on a different station and didn't get the alert - so it appears some stations got it, others didn't.
This isn't the first time I've heard these alerts for real - most of the time it's for an Amber Alert, but this is the third time I've heard a weather alert in the past few years - each time it was for severe thunderstorms moving through the area.
Just buy a little Baofeng dual band radio off eBay. They're cheap and even cheaper used. You can program in the weather alert frequencies and just leave it on and squelched. If you just use it to monitor you don't need a ham license.
Per FCC rules, if its an emergency situation you don't need a license to transmit either, if needed. The little radios will give you a nice tactical advantage if you are out of regular am\fm range or just don't listen to that anyway.
I was listening in my car this afternoon while waiting for my kids and heard the weather alert on two of the weather frequencies. It was very detailed.
They all blew the forecast on that one - radio, TV, none of them got that right. I guess to be fair, their were storms, but they were all outside the general PDX/Vancouver metro areas, so impacted a smaller % of the population.
Used to hear these quite often growing up in Tornado Alley but not for anything as pedestrian as a thunderstorm.
Yamhill got some. Not long after I got home it darkened and rumbled but I didn't get any. The mountain often causes some, but not this time. I love thunder and lightening and besides wanting to enjoy the sunny weather, that was one reason why I left work early (I have flex hours, as long as I put in my 40, and I am there for the 'core' hours, I can come and go pretty much as I want to).
Which gets me to thinking, maybe I should leave the radio on more often? I know there are alerts for cell phones, but I don't see how to enable them on my phone.
Some of the places had some pretty severe weather, and getting hit by lightening isn't something to laugh at. I remember when I used to XC ski and one day in Bend they advised to stay home because of high winds. I and my daughter and nephew took a break from skiing that day - one guy didn't and was killed by a tree falling on him. I pay attention to weather advisories.
I don't know, personally I expect something more serious than a severe thunderstorm from an EMS interruption. I guess I have great expectations.