Topic: The YouTube Weather Radio / EAS collecting / recording community

[PaulKTF]

Has anyone come across the people (there are quite a few) on YouTube who are obsessed with NOAA Weather Radio alerts?

They often have 10+ weather radios all plugged in at the same time. They set all of them to All Counties and All Events so all of the radios go off endlessly during the Spring and Summer months.

And they record all of the alerts and upload them to YouTube:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqn2TP_7Xz0[/youtube]

So they aren't really using the weather radios to get alerts that are important to them like we are, they're just obsessed with recording each and every alert for every weather event in every country they can get (!). I think it's tied into autism and obsessions but that's just a guess.

I'm kind of fascinated by their dedication to it- it must take a lot of time to track when alerts are coming in, record them all, and upload them.  Having my Weather Radio go off a half-dozen times an hour would drive me absolutely crazy, though!

And it's not just one person doing it- there are probably a good dozen or so YouTubers dedicated to doing this (maybe more?) so it's something a lot of people seem to enjoy doing.

I'm not looking down on them because hey, everyone has to have a hobby... Finding these videos actually inspired me to buy a couple of weather radios (I mean like 3!) and put them around my house (but mine are set to only alert me for my county and only for Tornado Warnings!).

In a way I actually think they're doing a good service by making people aware of what Weather Radios can do to alert people.

Also, a lot of them review specific models of weather radios which is helpful if you want to know what features a specific model has.

[ericjohn1987]

I myself post videos on YouTube of my Weather Radios, but I don't have footage of any of them getting an alert.

I am an older Millenial and when I was a teenager, I was the only one I knew of who regularly listened to Weather Broadcasts.

Now they've got a bunch of Generation Z members and even younger on YouTube who collect and show off weather radios.

They're might also be a few younger Millenials doing it as well.

But when I was a teen I was the only one I knew of who was into anything like that.

There were a lot of hunters and fishers who were familiar with weather radio, but they weren't into it for fun like I was.

By the way, I was the only licensed ham in my entire high school as well...

Now young people are getting in amateur radio much more often than when I was younger...

[luckie.st]

Saw this thread and registered just to reply. My son is on the autism spectrum and has recently become an "EAS enthusiast" (his own words). Has has 8 weather radios and yeah, they alert quite a bit. He does record them and is especially interested in the tests.

I can only say that once he becomes excited about something, he's all-in - whether that's weather radios, video games, memorizing the capital and countries of the world, etc.

He came in here while I was looking up weather stations (thought it'd be a bit of fun to set up during the holiday break), I showed him this post. He immediately recognized the video, just by the thumbnail.

So, yeah, you're describing my son to a "T". He can tell you all about the different weather radios, the different models, all of the local weather stations, where they're located, the different counties, etc. It's a bit obsessive, in my opinion, but it's just who he is. I find it quirky but charming.

[CoyoteRidge]

Going off topic but I am curious since you mentioned when he gets hooked to something, hes all in.  So im curious on when he moves to something different, does the old one just get completely dropped?

[luckie.st]

Going off topic but I am curious since you mentioned when he gets hooked to something, hes all in.  So im curious on when he moves to something different, does the old one just get completely dropped?

Good question. Sometimes and sorta is the answer. When he was younger, he could only handle one obsession at a time. So, sometimes what we'd see is that he'd be obsessed about something for a period of six months and then move on to something else for six months. Over the years, we've seen him come back to some of his earlier obsessions as well. Movie intros, for example. He'd watch the 20th Century Fox or Universal intros hundreds of times in a row or work through the process of re-creating them in a program like Blender. He's not been into movie intros in a few years, but it wouldn't surprise me if he ever got back into that.

At any rate, he's currently all in on EAS/NOAA/weather stuff as well as Super Mario 64. There's something of a gaming community around moding games like Mario 64 and he's been into Mario 64 since a very early age. It's kinda funny, but he's trying to persuade some of his Mario 64 friends to get into EAS/NOAA/weather.

[Cutty Sark Sailor]

Wonder how many are also performing a liegitimate act of public service by also streaming those live weather streams to NOAAweatherradio.org ... a project of this WxForum community?  Just sayin'... it's a lot simpler than it may sound.
https://noaaweatherradio.org/howto.html