Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada

I've got a NOAA weather radio near my bed. It's a Midland WR120 that I picked up several years ago for $20. I've programmed in what areas I want to pay attention to, and what alerts I'm interested in for those areas.

Accordingly, it spends the vast majority of its time just sitting there in silence. Months will go by without a single peep from it.

When a selected alert happens, it comes to life automatically (courtesy of SAME messages) and announces information about it... and then silences itself again. Current alerts are also denoted by a red or yellow LED that stays alight for the duration, for a good visual indicator, and briefly summarized information also shows on the very basic character display on the front.

And, well, that's pretty good for me. We get things like tornadoes here that can flatten a neighborhood in an instant, and I'd rather survive that unscathed than to wind up dead (or, worse: permanently maimed). Proactive, broadcast weather alerts help improve my odds of success.

And unlike my community's outdoor warning sirens that are hard to hear indoors even when I'm listening for them during scheduled tests, this is loud AF inside of my house and will wake the dead.

Other than plugging into the wall for power, it will also run for a long time (days, IIRC) on the 3 AA batteries that it uses for backup power.

Now, don't get me wrong: I've also got other means, but they're all complete shit.

I've had severe weather alerts show up on my phone before (from Google and/or Verizon), but they're amazingly inconsistent with whether they'll appear or not and seemingly impossible to control. I've set up push notifications for apps that are dedicated to the purpose, but my Samsung phone loves to put apps to sleep in ways that make reliable push notifications mostly a non-starter.

In terms of computers and Internet access: Yeah, sure -- I've got computers and Internet access. But I'm not trying to hit refresh on a weather page all night just to see if a tornado is happening nearby when the weather is iffy, or to set up a computer to alert me to a weather hazard. And when the power dips here because the weather is awful, the DOCSIS network immediately goes with it. The cell phone towers, which are slow here on their very best days, also get overloaded and become unusable for data.

Running my network on batteries and/or integrating a generator and/or getting a Starlink dish for backup sounds like a fools' errand when a trio of cheap alkaline cells and a normally-silent radio will do what I need.

So anyway, weather radio is a lot more than just a thing that a person can tune into if they elect to choose to hear the weather forecast.

And Canada's service appears offer similar functionality -- with SAME messages and the whole 9 yards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatheradio_Canada#History

You guys are losing something important up there.

For me, the value isn't in the weather report, but in the SAME alerts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding

I don't typically keep my phone on me when I'm in the house, but my weather radio is loud enough to hear anywhere in the house, the alerts it notifies for can be configured (unlike phone emergency alerts in Canada which all broadcast at the unconfigurable ICBM-incoming level, so the result is that authorities have to be very careful of alert fatigue), it never runs out of battery, never needs software updates, never has its OS take away app permissions, etc.

So far in the four years I've had the radio the worst it's alerted me for has been severe hail (thankfully), but that's saved me thousands of dollars in damage to my cars. (And gave me time to cover my tomato plants.)

I don't know of any way to reliably replicate this type of alert even with reliable internet.