NOAA Weather Radio

[Mark Whittington]

Funny and only sort of un-related story.

About 16(?) years ago I was subcontracted to modify the icecast streaming
radio server to accept input from a two-channel audio source and send each
channel to its own stream.  The equipment that NOAA was using to source the
audio for NWR only provided output on balanced XLR connectors, and the
audio cards that were available at the time with XLR inputs were something
like $1k each, so it saved them a fair bit of money to be able to stream
two different NWR channels from one card's stereo input.

I'm sure that my code wasn't in service anymore well before they stopped
streaming them at all, but I'm kind of sad that it's gone now.

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Mike O'Dell <mo at ccr.org> wrote:

> i'm pondering the easiest, cheapest, and smallest way
> to receive NOAA Weather Radio and get it into UDP packets.
>
> the canonical picture is:
>
> off-the-shelf-NWR -> audio cable -> sound card on PC
>
> but I want to make it very small, very cheap, and completely
> turnkey, as in:
>          take brick out of box
>          pull out whip antenna
>          install wall-wart PS
>          insert DC connector
>          joy
>
> Posit using a Raspberry B+ as the computes.
> I know how to do the inevitable user config pretty painlessly
> via a web browser. That's messy but not hard. biggest
> questions are configuring wifi or wired ethernet, and
> picking which of possibly several NWR channels is "the one".
> looking at the RSSI, the "local" NWR is probably the strongest.
> or just send the audio out the web page and let the UI change
> the channel. seems awfully brute force.
>
> does anyone know of a componentized NWR module? i've looked
> some but not found anything.
>
> i've thought about doing it SDR with one of the USB TV tuner
> dongles, but that's problematic for several reasons.
> (1) it's not selective so local overloading is likely
> to be a problem and (2) form factor is really crap.
>
> ideas appreciated.
>
> Whassiz for?
>
> There are many more NWR channels out there than are currently
> available on the web. NWS did have a bunch more of them online
> but that seems to have gotten the budget axe. the way they are
> done now is by the first picture up above. i'd like to
> make a small box that could be lobbed out of a passing car
> at someone who just has to take it in, plug in the wall-wart
> and then forget about it. this would make it easy to get all
> those stations available over the web.
>
>       -mo
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