Recent S.A.M.E. Messages:

NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts weather information 24/7. On a normal day you'll hear hourly observations, weather forecasts, and climate information. It really proves its worth on the not-so-normal days. Then you'll hear hazardous weather outlooks, weather watches, weather warnings, special weather statements, and radar summaries. Best of all, you get the information directly from the source, with no middle-man.

Specially built receivers have the ability to silently monitor the weather broadcast, then sound off an alarm when watches and warnings are issued. Many weather radio receivers also use a feature known as S.A.M.E. (specific area message encoding). On S.A.M.E. receivers you can program the counties that you want to receive warnings for, and ignore warnings in areas that are further away. The best weather radio receivers will let you select which types of warnings to sound an alarm for. This feature is known as "event blocking." It can come in handy if you don't live in a flood-prone area and don't like getting woken up, in the middle of the night, for warnings that mean nothing to you.

Thecoldfront.com uses a Reecom R-1630 Weather Radio to recieve NOAA Weather Radio station KGG-95. This station broadcasts on a frequncy of 162.425 Mhz from a tower in Marshland, WI (just across the river from Winona, MN). The broadcast originates at the National Weather Service office in La Crosse, WI. The weather radio is connected to the line-in jack on my computer's sound card. On the computer I'm using 6 programs: Edcast converts the audio into MP3 format and sends it to an Icecast server hosted by Crushed Box Software. ScannerCast converts the audio into MP3 format and sends it to broadcastify.com. SeaTTY monitors the audio for S.A.M.E. messages and saves them to disk. Finally, there's two programs that I wrote: one converts the audio from saved watches/warnings to MP3 format; the other syncs the watches/warnings with the website.

Special thanks to Crushed Box Software for streaming this broadcast and over 60 other weather radio broadcasts.