NOAA Weather Radio Receiver and Alert Decoder

NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts forecasts and warnings 24/7 on seven frequencies around 162.4–162.55 MHz. Alerts start with SAME data bursts that software can decode into the event type and county codes.

Mission steps

1. Find your station

   Look up the NOAA Weather Radio transmitter and frequency for your county on weather.gov.

2. Listen

   Use rtl_fm to tune the frequency and pipe the audio to your speakers.

3. Decode alerts

   Pipe the audio into the multimon-ng EAS decoder to print SAME messages.

4. Filter by county

   Match the county FIPS codes in the message so you only get local warnings.

5. Alert

   Send hurricane, tornado and flood warnings to your phone with ntfy.

Code

sudo apt install -y rtl-sdr multimon-ng sox
# listen (replace with your station's frequency)
rtl_fm -f 162.475M -s 22050 | play -r 22050 -t raw -e s -b 16 -c 1 -V1 -
# decode SAME / EAS alerts
rtl_fm -f 162.475M -s 22050 | multimon-ng -t raw -a EAS /dev/stdin

Tip: test every script on the bench before installing it in a moving machine.

Questions