What do you guys and girls use in your vehicle for a weather radio?
I am a ham and am a member of Skywarn and I drive 1000 miles a week for work. So I wanted a WX radio with an alert function. One that was sensitive for here in the mountains. I didn't need same codes due to the area I travel and preferred to catch all of the warnings. I also needed one that was robust. No little pocket radios for me. I am like a bull in a china shop.
I also needed it to be reasonably priced.
They have ham radios out with WX scan and alerts functionality. But on most of them to get the alerts all the time you have to dedicate the radio to that function. That makes for a $200-$500 weather radio. Not good for me.
I looked at all the standard WX radios for the home. My favorite one, and the one I use at home is the Midland WR-100. I have had it for years and it just works all the time. And I have one of the little Midland hand helds that I use on the boat... It is really not all that sensitive. The little rubber duck kills it's receive and if you hook up an external antenna then you are no longer shirt pocket ready. Any way all these radios just seemed to fragile for me to schlog around in a vehicle 50 hours a week.
After looking about I started looking at the cb radios with WX alert features. They seemed to meet all my requirements. But hams have an inherent aversion to anything related to CB and the old 11 meter band. But I looked anyway because my needs generally overruled any predetermined social juxtaposition. And they were cheap!
That's what I ended up with... A RS TRC-521. It's an old discontinued model. And they are all over eBay for $25.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Radio-Shack-TRC-521-40-Ch-CB-Radio-No-Ground-Antenna_W0QQitemZ380216357203QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5886a93153I also bought a regular lip mount cb antenna and a special WX Band element that attaches to the cb antenna to improve WX band reception.
Are your experiences similar?
