Midland WR300 Weather Radio Review

For years, the name Midland and emergency response have been nearly synonymous as the electronics giant provides a line of transceivers, repeaters and standard receiving radios that help save lives such as the WR-300 All-Hazards/Weather Receiver.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has the task of providing the public with 7/24/365 up-to-the minute information on changing weather situations on seven specific radio frequencies which run from 162.400 to 162.550. The transmissions are made "in the clear," or in plain language so that people can understand if a thunderstorm is bearing down on them or a winter storm threatens.

For years the warning areas proved extremely large and NOAA was constantly looking for ways to improve the coverage for a specific area and the ones next door or 10 counties away. They did succeed in updating and increasing their "weather product" array, as it is called. The problem is that when the agency adopted computer technology and married it to their forecasting function they found they could slice counties into tiny bite-sized pieces that could, if they wanted to, provide information to the specific street level.

That is a bit much, so NOAA chose to concentrate on the 30 or so counties around a receiving site (it doesn't matter whether the receiver is Midland or Kenwood or whether it is County A or County Z, each radio has the capability of providing information products for the 30 counties nearest). The problem for NOAA became twofold, providing specific information for a specific county. They solved this by dedicating a specific frequency to a major area such as New York City. The second part of the problem was how did you warn the public that, even with their radios turned off, that there was really rough weather rolling in, tornadoes, for instance. NOAA developed the SAME signal for that issue. SAME stands for Specific Area Message Encoding and has the capability of turning on and sending a very specific warning tone to a SAME (also known as All Hazards) receiver.

Simply put, the system works well. Midland has taken it many steps further by not only providing the seven primary frequencies, but also allowing you to add or subtract specific areas (162.400 coverage usually is about 50 miles before the next round of counties is entered as a different information package). You can tailor your WR-300 receiver to receive very local information or you can add state or other country alert information.

Midland does allow you to program in as many as 30 counties and, using its menuing system, access the information you want.

When not in use as a weather radio, the WR-300 becomes a standard AM/FM clock radio with a large speaker and fine sound. The large (roughly 4-inch) screen also provides you not only with frequency or channel readout but also with two lines of alphanumeric information about the weather hazard.

A very reasonably priced receiver, it is powered by an AC adapter or four AA batteries. For those who have the WR-300, they have a radio tool that offers them early warnings of impending heavy weather, something that is needed all over the nation.