Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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>The fall of TV

You mean in your daily in-take of media? Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather. It's actually part of their licensing. So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather. Even if regular programming is on, they will break in when requested by the NWS. Local radio will as well, but I can't remember the last time I heard Clearcom or whatever the othe station owner is do this. I just don't listen to radio.

Also, most local stations will also be running live webcasts to FB/YT/etc. They do this in order to avoid interrupting programming until it is urgent enough to do so.

I'm in North Texas, and during severe weather season, I have a web browser permantely tuned to the radar. If it's getting bad, I'll find a local station.

> I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar

If you're in Hawaii, you'll get a text.

> So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather.

How would I even go about doing that? The only display devices I have are monitors. Even for radio, I would have to go to my car to listen.

Get an emergency radio. They’re not expensive.

If getting a cheap TV is out of the question. Get a cheap USB TV Tuner (and prob a decent portable aerial, the ones that come with cheap USB TV Tuners are OK if you live in a strong signal area, but you might need something a bit better if not).

It comes with the side effect of being a decent SDR for tuning into all sorts of things not just your local TV stations :-)

Also get a cheap battery operated radio and a stock of batteries for it. Batteries don't last forever in storage, so replace them every now and then (check the expiry date on the pack) and don't leave the batteries in the radio but next to it (saves them leaking over the contacts, last thing you want to do when you NEED the radio is having to take it apart to clean the battery contacts or hunting for the batteries that fit it).

EDIT: Also something to put on your list, A decent flashlight. Your phone is great, but if you have a power outage then you will want to kepe that charge for actual phone calls.

> It comes with the side effect of being a decent SDR for tuning into all sorts of things not just your local TV stations :-)

USB broadcast tuners can be repurposed as software-defined radios? That sounds like a few Amazon and GitHub links I’d be very curious to see!

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1497 <-- is relatively affordable

But most of the cheap ones ($20 and less) are just DTV receivers that happen to be able to provide a signal that SDR tools can utilize.

More information about this: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

I think https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ would be a good place to start learning about SDR USB sticks. But beware -'this rabbit hole goes deep!

FM radio and ATSC TV are still things despite the presence of new media. And the hardware is cheaper than it’s ever been. A television is like fifty or sixty bucks on sale. It’s ridiculous. I remember as a kid so badly wanting a small 12” TV and it was like $250.

If you can get an antenna up then there are Ethernet-connected HDTV tuners you can use to pick up OTA.

Are you being pedantic with no information on how to receive local broadcasts because you've chosen to not have TV/radio/etc, or are you really just unaware of how to do this on modern equipment? Many responses answer if it is the latter, for the former, well, go back under your bridge troll ;-)

I was being pedantic. But also truthful, in that I do not have a tv and the only radio is in my car.

That's what I thought. So, the onus is on you to stay informed. Society has put in place many many ways to notify of severe weather. You have elected to use none. Don't be the next statistic.

The onus is indeed on me. When I've lived in places with rare susceptibility to tornados, they use the emergency alert system. When I lived somewhere with susceptibility to north korea firing missiles overhead, they have an air raid siren. When I lived somewhere the only weather danger is hurricanes, I just check the weather forecast.

Part of living in an area prone to certain disasters is being prepared to deal with them. Get a small weather radio.

But I would have to listen to its crap all the time waiting for the rare signal I actually want from it.

Edit: having continued reading more comments and googling what the fuck a “weather radio” is… I’m now deeply annoyed at the fact I have no equivalent living in Australia. I could look at a global weather service like Navtex but I’m actually not interested in the weather, i just want a way to get emergency broadcast warnings without relying on my phone. The system in Australia doesn’t use cell broadcast it uses a shitty alternative, they are tendering for a replacement that does use cell broadcast but who knows when that will actually be running. Since I have zero trust in the current system I’d like a way to get critical emergency notices without having to develop a habit of paranoid checking emergency websites or building my own fragile alert system using their RSS feeds or something like that.

If it’s of any comfort, there used to be a lot less severe weather to need a radio for, and no one’s quite caught up to the reality of it yet.

The thing about severe weather is you can tell when it's happening. Tornadoes don't typically drop out of the clear blue sky. If it's a heavy thunderstorm and the weather forecast for the day calls for torando watches then keep the radio on and nearby. This doesn't have to be complicated.

In my city, the public local station (CBFT-2) is broadcasting news and some other emissions on the Web. But I love my cheap ATSC tuner "converter box": can be useful in case of network outage, it can also record programs on a USB drive and play a lot of video files. Sadly, it's difficult to find an ATSC dongle for computer, they're less popular and more expensive than DVB dongles.

> How would I even go about doing that? The only display devices I have are monitors.

Buy a $15 DTV tuner and antenna and hook them up to a monitor. You're being blasted with free HDTV over the air.

I live fairly remotely in Canada and I'm not - I believe CBC may be available but I'm not certain

It was somewhat rhetorical, as I have access to weather alerts via the internet and am not in an area vulnerable to tornados or earthquakes.

Get a radio and batteries. It's part of being prepared for an emergency.

Wow. Go to their website, Twitter, whatever. Spend $15 on a weather radio with alerts. It’s really not as hard as you’re making it out to be.

> Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather.

Television stations in the U.S. are required, in a broad sense, to serve their local communities, and many choose to do so by providing weather forecasts and alerts, but I don’t know of any law or regulation that requires broadcasters to provide weather information, in emergencies or at all.

Stations do have to participate in the Emergency Alert System, but they don’t have to transmit anything other than the required tests and an Emergency Action Notification for a national emergency. (See 47 CFR 11.52(d)(4).)

The better source for tornado and other warnings is NOAA Weather Radio (https://www.weather.gov/nwr/), a network of dedicated FM stations transmitting in the 162 MHz band. Receivers are widely available and can be programmed to turn on only when a warning for a specific area is broadcast.

Well, yeah, required might have been too strong. It is strongly frowned upon for a station with a news/weather program to not participate in a "The NWS has requested...". Not sure they'd not get their license renewed, but their audience sure wouldn't watch them for much longer. What kind of news station would NOT broadcast this info?

Besides, if you're a news/weather station in Tornado Alley, you pride yourself on the equipment and people operating it. They do entire promos dedicated to storm spotting etc. I've worked with one local station shooting a package specifically for this.

Some of the news channels where my parents live have experimented with outsourcing and/or prerecording their weather reports. On one channel, the daily weather report talks about yesterday's weather and tomorrow's weather, but skips things like the current day's high temperature because it hasn't happened yet when that segment was recorded. Although I suppose if the anchors are live they can jump in with an emergency warning.

I hate everything you just said about current local station ownership. Budget cuts to the extreme to get outsourced weather. I don't know where "here" is for your parents, but I'm assuming weather doesn't get severe often there. Reminds me of LA. LA doesn't have weather. It has climate. The local programming there is beyond ridiculous. In my area, local weather people can literally save lives with their broadcasts. Yes, they get updates from NWS, but they are true meteorologists to be able to reach conclusions on their own without needing hand holding from NWS. That's my base line. Anything less than just seems like a waste.

> Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather. It's actually part of their licensing. So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather

On what? I don’t have a tuner

Honestly. You know exactly you’d need to watch TV (a tuner). Or more accurately, if you have a TV, you really just need an antenna. If you don’t have a TV, then many (most?) local TV stations have a website with streaming video. This is especially true for news and weather. And if that all fails, you can get a network tuner/dvr that will stream broadcast TV to an app.

There are many options to get local TV/weather. Let’s not pretend that this is a problem without a solution.

Smartphones are also plugged into emergency service broadcasts. I've received a few for severe weather in my area.

Get an emergency weather radio. I used to have one in the Midwest. I imagine they still work, right?

> If you're in Hawaii, you'll get a text.

Or even a missile alert! This must have been terrifying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...

Hand crank radio that picks up weather band frequencies and has a built in flashlight and can be charged via solar. I love this gadget!

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