• A Background Story
• Types of Emergency Radios
• Weather radios
• AM radios
• Shortwave
• Buyer's Choices
  

Scroll down for the Buyer's Guide!

In a world dominated by the internet and the cell phone, the radio should have disappeared already. It's true that it doesn't have the major place in the realm of news, entertainment or communications that it once did--radio has become the omnipresent voice in the background when we're driving or the place we turn to for local news when things go wrong close to home. There are still times when we should have one handy. In emergencies, the cell phone network is one of the first things to go down, either from damage or overuse or intentional disruption by civil authorities. When power goes, so do our tv's and satellite dishes and internet connections.

If you live in Tornado Alley you know the drill. When the storms get close, you shut down everything expensive so the next lightning bolt doesn't fry a few thousand dollars worth of consumer electronics. That cuts out news and weather and storm reports, so you're left with looking out the window and listening to the radio. If the sky turns black and you hear that rumbling heading your way, you grab the radio and head for the basement. There's still an excellent market for good radios. In fact, there's been talk of making the basic weather warning radio a legal part of the household, as essential to human safety as the smoke alarm.

Don't believe everything you hear about that. Smoke alarms are good things to have, but they don't always work or respond to the right scent in the air. Radios are similar--there's no substitute for being aware of your surroundings and keeping a watch on the world around you when a storm is coming.

My main reason for owning a good radio is that I like them. Always have, ever since the 50's when on stormy nights we'd head over to my grandparents house to huddle around the big jukebox style AM set, listening to Mark, the local announcer who got called in half asleep but in a good humor, to broadcast whatever news there was every time things got serious at two in the morning. As I grew older I graduated to AM transistor sets I smuggled into school, even if the only thing I could pick up through the earpiece I ran through my sleeve during history class was the livestock auction from Berryville. Late at night instead of studying I'd sit listening to Spanish language broadcasts from Texas, fading in and out of consciousness along with the transmission. Then it was shortwave DX'ing, and kits from Heathkit that were always three parts short and silent as a rock when you turned them on after six months of careful assembly. When eventually I did get them working, I'd hear languages I'd never heard before, strange voices fading in and out as they recited number codes for the CIA, and forbidden but extremely boring news from behind the Red Curtain.

With the end of the Cold War and the rise of the internet, much of the mystique went away. Now, unless you travel to some very remote places, shortwave isn't even very entertaining. The news has gone somewhere else, to blogs and forums and pages filled with unverifiable stories. I still have a good shortwave, but now I use it to listen to Coast to Coast AM late at night, drifting off to sleep while other people with even wilder ideas than mine ramble on about aliens and government conspiracies and the meaning of numbers.

Things haven't changed so much at all.

Everybody needs one.  Spend a little, spend a lot, but the bare bones device you should not do without is a portable radio with access to the NOAA weather band.  At the NOAA website you can punch up a list of stations for your state--individual radar stations and transmitter stations cover local weather conditions and operate fairly independently of one another.  If you can pick up the station, it's close enough to have information that applies to you, or at least will apply in a few minutes when the storm arrives.  Weather band radios are not necessarily fancy, but if you get a cheap one it may not work right when you need it.  The bargain versions often have features that are questionably useful, like alarms that alert you when a storm warning is issued.  I have one like that but never use the alarm feature.  The alarm requires the radio to be always on, and you can always hear the broadcast even though the volume is low until the warning signal comes in.  It uses up batteries and keeps me awake for no reason.  Other than that, it's ok--NOAA comes in loud and clear.

NOAA is weather and nothing else, so you don't have to wait for a break in the music and ads to get information about the impending storm.  It's not a perfect system, and is least perfect if you live in the dip between transmitter zones.  Where I once lived I was at the edge of two radar areas and we did have storms that never were reported, as well as warnings that were issued twenty minutes after the storms passed.  Usually, though, the moment by moment forecasts are pretty accurate.

A radio for the boat, the car, or the pocket is always a good thing to take along, and many quality personal entertainment devices do incorporate the weather band option.  A tiny version like the Sony Walkman is light enough to take with you when you go for a jog on Spring mornings when the weather is flaky.  When you go boating, it's kind of crazy to be out on the water without the weather report handy.  Of course, you do have to pay attention, but the weather report can give you an accurate assessment of whether the storm on the horizon is going somewhere else, or if you need to head for home before it hits.

You'll either love them or think they're useless. Shortwave listening is an acquired habit; if you enjoy looking for readable stations and trying to figure out which ones they might be, shortwave is perfect. Transmission quality is usually poor, with even the best and strongest stations fading in and out constantly. Most radios show some oscillator drift, meaning retuning the station is a never ending task suitable for a person with safecracker quality fingers. A few with digital tuners have become very good at holding onto signals but even so, shortwave is an imperfect thing. If you plan a trip to Africa or some other distant continent and want to tune in Voice of America now and then for the news from home, in English, a shortwave of good quality can bring you the stock market report in the middle of the Kalihari. Transmission frequencies of the shortwave band bounce around a lot, refracted by atmospheric layers, so anywhere you happen to be you may be lucky and get a good signal. Or, maybe not. The different bands are best at different times of day or night, static blank at some times and warbling with information at others. There's hardly anything other than evangelical stations today that broadcast 24/7; most stations run at most a few hours a day and you'll need a schedule and transmission frequency list to find them except by accident.

Between models and brands there's a huge difference in quality, with radios priced high that are seldom popular with buyers and low priced bargains that users rave about. They all have good points and shortcomings; one person might love a particular version of Grundig and the next person who buys one can't pick up his neighborhood AM station. Some of that is operator inexperience, and some of it is location, but many dissatisfied users simply didn't know what shortwave was like until they tried it themselves.

It's tough to figure out, in the store, whether a radio is good or is a piece of junk. Malls and flourescent lights are poison for shortwave reception--all you can hear on the shortwave band inside a store is static, and I've never met a store manager who volunteered to let me take one out to the parking lot to play with. You can only read up on the models and see whether someone else took the gamble first.

When you get home with it, don't expect the telescopic antenna to pick up much. You may find the strongest stations, like the time signal from Ft. Carson, Colorado, but many portables won't pick up much else without a long wire antenna. Fifty feet of copper wire strung up in the back yard and fed in through a window will make a huge difference. A few very sensitive portable receivers may be overloaded by the tiny boost that wire gives--it's usually a crucial part of the system, and if you don't have a place for one in your apartment building you will really come up short on listening options.

The easiest pick is the simple weather radio--one for the home, one for the road, maybe even one for the pocket.

For the home, I recommend a NOAA alarm weather radio that actually works: the First Alert WX-150 Public Alert Radio with S.A.M.E. Specific Area Message Encoding (S.A.M.E.) gives you control over which combination of 79 different alert warnings your unit will consider adequate reason for waking you up in the middle of the night or any other moment of the day. If you want word of tornados but no need of flood warnings, you can program the unit to give only the alerts you want to hear. It's a quiet digital unit, not a cheap analog that pretends to be useful. The LCD screen gives time and date as well as a scrolling text version of the current warning. The WX-150 runs on AC house current but does have an on-board battery backup. Be sure to consult the manual for the correct battery settings or they'll be dead when the power goes out. The WX-150 monitors NOAA 24 hours a day, so it's a set it and forget it radio--the drawback to it is that this is all it does. No music, no talk, just permanent eyes on the weather horizon.

If you must have that clock radio function, the Midland WR-300 combines alarm clock and AM/FM reception in a programmable S.A.M.E. weather alert monitor. It's a little complicated for dealing with in the early morning when you're half awake and want five more minutes of quiet time. By the time you hit the right button you'll be wide awake.

As long as you're thinking of boating safety, might as well go all the way with this waterproof weather alert walkie talkie with three call alerts and access to all American and Canadian marine band transmission channels. The Midland Nautico 3 includes rechargeable batteries and a headset as well as AC and DC power adaptors and more perks than you'd expect in a moderately priced handheld.

For hikers, bicyclists and runners who want only the basics plus some lightweight entertainment, the Sony Walkman SRF-M37V is a high quality headset radio with weather band reception, AM and FM, digital tuning and presets, and a weight of only 8 ounces. It runs over 24 hours on a single AAA battery, and it's a bargain. Get another for your glove compartment.

If two way communication is what you need, the Midland Outfitter Series starts you off on your hunting trip with two quality pocket sized transceivers with a thirty mile range, plus weather band reception. The walkie talkies are waterproof, camouflaged, and shock resistant.

The easiest advice is what not to buy. Don't buy a radio with analog tuning. If it has a round knob that you turn to change the reception frequency, that's analog. Even if the frequency readout is digital, knob style controls mean that inside the machine you're still adjusting the oscillator frequency by the same old system of pulleys, cables, and adjustable capacitor plates that tweaked the Heathkits I built 50 years ago. They will eventually go wrong and the system has always been prone to inaccuracy and drift. Not that all are bad--my present SW radio is analog with digital readout, the action is good, the oscillator is stable, and I'm happy with it because I've been doing this a long time and my standards are low. If this is your first foray into SW radio, get the best you can get--PLL digital tuning. If it's digital, you push buttons and a microcomputer tells the oscillator what frequency to ring up. It's very accurate, very stable, sometimes capable of more than the input keyboard would imply, and like everything else electronic, someday it will go wrong. By the time it does, there will be something new and better that you want anyhow.

First choice on my list, and judging from the sales numbers the first choice on many other people's as well, is the Sony ICF-SW7600GR. PLL tuning, great sensitivity, good sound quality, and so many other good features you'll have to read the manual to find out. A synchronous detection circuit locks onto weak signals and keeps them tuned, reducing station fade. Perhaps its weak point is that complexity--you can do so much with it that you'll need that manual to remind you of what is possible and how to make it happen. If you like to tinker with electronics, it will keep you happy.

Kaito's KA-1102 World Band Radio is a paperback book sized shortwave/AM/FM radio with clock, alarm and sleep function, which many people rate as one of the most successful at actually tuning in shortwave stations without hooking up an external antenna. It's a great radio for travelers, nearly light enough to justify stashing in your backpack if you wander mountain trails. The dual conversion receiver makes this extra sensitive and an external antenna may actually be too much input for it. If you're an apartment dweller and you have problems tuning in anything that's not on cable, you could hang a 25 foot long wire out the window and listen to the African World Beat. If you're inventive there's always a way.

The Grundig S-350 AM/FM Shortwave has a smaller following, myself included. It does have analog tuning, but since I grew up with the Apollo program it's a bit of nostalgia I like. The audio quality is better than the smaller radios and there are a few perks I like, including a selection of sleep delay times up to 90 minutes, so if I fall asleep before George Noory finishes talking the radio won't play all night long. I've read that other people have had poor luck with SW reception from this model, while others like me have had excellent results. I suspect operator malfunctions lie at the root of the trouble. Don't forget to turn up the gain.