Reecom Weather Radio Review

Our very old Midland weather radio expired, and we went to Radio Shack for a new one, only to find that they were out of stock. No reasonably-priced weather radios on hand at all. So we turned to the internet, ordering a Reecom R-1630 Alert Radio from Weather Connect.

Bottom line: It works as advertised; I'm quite pleased with it.

• It has S.A.M.E. technology, allowing us to program it to sound off only when our own county is included in an alert, whereas the old radio sounded off for any county within the range of the Twin Cities NOAA radio transmitter, a much larger area which included several large Wisconsin counties.
• I have actually programmed it for our county and several counties to the west, where storms usually come from, and recent alerts have confirmed that it works correctly. In fact, the memory now shows 18 alerts in the three weeks that we have owned the radio.
• The owner's manual is a little clumsy, and the radio would be hard to program without it, but I actually had no trouble with the programming.
• Siren (alarm) volume is separately adjustable from radio volume; that's nice.
• Alert duration (time until the radio goes silent again) is not adjustable but is short; that's even nicer.

I don't own stock in the company, and I can think of improvements that could be made. For example, with batteries in the machine (it works even when power fails), it's hard to tell whether it is plugged into house power or not. It should have an indicator. Further, it's a table model with no holes in the back for hanging it on a wall. Duh. But the bottom line is that it works.

I saw part of an advertisement on TV yesterday that Rainbow stores (or one particular store?) will be selling this radio in the Twin Cities this weekend for $30. If so, that's a much better deal that I got on the internet. This is the time of year to have one; in Minnesota, there are more tornados in June than any other month.