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What are Weather Radios?

Weather radios are units the size of a small intercom system that monitor the airwaves for watches and warnings issued by Environment Canada when severe weather is approaching a region. It is basically a radio weather station that gives the current conditions for your area and any other pertinent information. It is operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

These units can become especially important when severe thunderstorms or tornadoes are affecting a region.  When the radio receives a signal, many of them will make a very loud buzzer type sound that runs for about 3 mins.  The only way this can be shut of it by touching the button on the machine. It immediately starts broadcasting the conditions for the area and why the warning alarm was issued. This manual shut-off can be very important when storm are occurring very late at night that you would not know about until it was too late.

These units use regular power when it is available and switch over to battery back-up if the power in your area goes off.  They run about $50 and are available at Radio Shack.  I treat it like a smoke detector for weather.  You may never need it but nice to know it is there when you do. There are also units that a portable for those who travel or camp that can be purchased as well.

Important Weatherradio News:

Thought I would put a new page for weather radio news.  This will be updated with more information soon.

Due to the number of people responding that their weatheradio's are not picking up alert tones for severe thunderstorm & tornado warnings,etc., Environment Canada has restarted it's testing tone that was suspended for 2 years.  Below are the specifics.  These radios can be purchased at Radio Shack and such and are a very good source of weather info 24 hours a day. ( I have one and can't live without it)

This Wednesday June 17th at noon, Environment Canada will do the first tone alerts of weatherradio across all regions in Ontario where WxRadio is available. After that, tone alerts will be conducted the first Wednesday of each month barring technological difficulties.

Tone alerts will be started at noon and will continue until all tone alert messages have been loaded so it is possible that your radio will not tone at exactly the noon hour but following the noon hour. It is possible that it could take up to 1/2 hour for all messages to be processed.

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