New Idea for receiving local weather warnings

[Jacob S]

This idea about receiving the local weather warnings is basically running on about the same idea as bringing the local news from the smaller DMA's. It could be put on an audio channel and each audio channel would use a weather station in a region of certain counties it would cover. This could also be done on the OpenTv interactive channel 100 but the warnings would need to come fast although a visual statement would be nice as well.

It would be nice if a local weather warning was in your area perhaps you could get an alert by the receiver green light flashing (just as it would if you got a mail message) or a message come up (just like a timer reminder) or it turn to the channel by itself in which you could set the receiver in a setting to do this.

[firephoto]

NOAA weather radio operates in the 162 mHz range, they could use the audio feed from that and have every area of the country covered with local wx and warnings. It would take a lot of channels but they would be very low bandwidth mono-audio channels. A little bit of software to decode the alert tone and you're all set.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/ has some info on the system.
I don't know if it is like this everywhere, but here the audio is computer generated voice which I would guess originates from the text version of your local weather. They could even stream the text on the audio channel like they do with the artist info now on the music channels. Then you would just need the software to pick out a text string for hazardous wx or alerts.

[Geronimo]

DirecTV sends mail regularly. May DISH receivers are not capable. It is still in the menus but often the memory has been reallocated to other purposes.

[ChrisPC]

RCA is coming out with TVs with built-in Weatheradio later this year. They will tune in the NOAA stations with built-in antennas and have audio and video warnings by county even if the TV is turned off.

[tampa8]

Kind of a neat idea, but it would seem to be easier to get a weather alert radio that does all that and more.

[Jacob S]

It is hard to pick the signal up in some areas out here just as its hard to pick up the local stations on an antenna. I also thought this would be something that could be used on XM Radio.

[catman]

I am on the computer watching for storms in wisconsin . A station here . NBC26 will stay on as long , as there is a severe thunder storm warning , tornado warning . THey will return to regular programming once the warning has either been canceled or expired . They are the only station to this . We had cold air spouts . ALL the aother networks were running sports . NBC26 Broke in and , followed the storm .

[Jacob S]

The locals here will display it along the bottom of the screen with radars and text information the whole time severe storms are going on and sometimes will break in to give further information. Sometimes they will stay on and report.

[TNGTony]

What is this OBSESSION with weather? The weather warnings from hell are one of the things that drove me AWAY from watching local TV in the first place. The mandatory weather warning test on ALL the channels on a cable system at the SAME time is one of the things that ensure I will NEVER have cable TV again.

Yes, I understand the need for warnings for REAL weather emergencies. But 99.99989876789876543% of the time, it's CRAP! Just another bug on the screen with moving radar images, county maps, crawls, tones and more for.....Severe thunderstorm WATCH! Or what I like to call the "it's going to rain alert". Right now all the local channels have maps and crawls and all types of CRAP on the screen because there is a floor watch in some areas and a flood warning in others.

IT HAS BEEN RAINING OFF AND ON FOR 10 DAYS STRAIGHT! DUH!!!!!

There has to be a balance. To me the weather warnings have been so overused I think they are more dangerous now than when we didn't have any!

See ya
Tony

[Jacob S]

I imagine they would add the option to turn that feature off if they would add something like that. I have an interest in weather.

[TopCat99]

The PIT NOAA radio station is now computer voice too. Has been for a couple years (used to have many different human voices behind it).

KDKA used to (maybe still does) have weather--forecasts and all--on SAP. I tried to pick it up with Dish shortly after getting it waaay back in '00, but got nothing. I could hook up a set of rabbit ears later and see if it's still there I suppose. While it was by no means an automatic system, it did give you a quick way to see what's up. Couple that with an alert system of some kind and it would be a valuable tool :)

[jeffr]

How many people remember the old emergency broadcast system tests from years ago? Now those really sucked.

The old emergency broadcast system has been replaced with a new technology called EAS (Emergency Alert System) that allows for digitally encoded emergency messages. With an EAS alert, the message is encoded as to the alert type and the counties affected by the alert. With a good decoder, you can filter out all the alerts that do not directly apply to your county. Further more you can filter out specific alert types that you do not wish to receive (higher end decoders appear to do this, lower end ones do not allow for alert type filtering but do support county specific filtering).

The latest technology using this EAS broadcast has been implimented by NOAA and the National Weather Service. They call it S.A.M.E. My weather radio with SAME will only alert me to watches and warnings for my local county. Otherwise the other messages that are streamed through are ignored. Since it is digital and since it uses the standard EAS message format, the actual bandwidth used is very small and includes alert type, location, start of event, end of event, and event number (plus I'm sure much more).

I believe all cable companies with over 5,000 subscribers were supposed to impliment the EAS system on their cable systems by late 2002. I think in their cases they just had to rebroadcast the actual decoded text message for their area. Unfortuantely DBS systems would not function with decoders on the uplink side. We would need to pass all of the encoded information through to the receivers. However, if the receiver had the decode capability, you could filter to get only those pieces of information that you configure it for (including county by county).

I'm surprised that dbs providers were not required to impliment some sort of decode capability in their receivers. This is a can of works I wouldn't want to kick. Does anyone know if this was ever addressed by DBS providers?

[Jacob S]

They could provide the signals through spotbeams for the areas therefore would be a lot less warnings for each area. This would not be good though for those areas not having a spotbeam yet.