
Android EAS NOAA Weather Radio Alert Decoder - wolframio
http://phasenoise.livejournal.com/2601.html
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chakalakasp
As someone who spends a lot of time with a weather radio and lots of more
technical than usual weather apps (I photograph extreme weather), this is an
interesting concept but I have a hard time seeing the practicality in when
held up to the existing network of apps and baked-in phone features that do
this. The latter being the most important -- for real weather emergencies like
Tornadoes, the wireless carries now push out WEAs automagically to customers
in the warning's geofenced area
([https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/wireless-emergency-
aler...](https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/wireless-emergency-alerts-wea)).
I often get them before the weather radio does. There are a handful of apps
that do this as well through proprietary channels, though I agree that it's
difficult to vet which app you can trust.

But all this ignores that there is a really cheap, rugged, robust solution out
there that already exists - an actual weather radio. I'd much sooner use one
of those than start slapping hardware onto my smartphone (which has to stay on
continually if you want to catch the alert), which I'd first have to root.

Now don't get me wrong, as a nerd I love to see stuff like this -- making
technology do things they were never designed to do. But it doesn't do much
for me as a product concept, even if you could streamline the hardware down to
something the size of a penny and eliminated the root requirement.

