I want to tune into the 162 MHz radio frequency and do some smart home integration with the alerts. I found this discontinued breakout board but I haven't been able to find any replacement either in board form or an IC (that SI4707 chip shows as out of stock on Digikey and Mouser as well, but if it ever comes back in stock I'll try my hand at recreating the sparkfun board, since it doesn't seem like the chip has changed since).
While the SAME functionality of that chip would be a nice to have I probably can do without it, since I would just be messing with the 1050 Hz alert tone on the broadcast.
Does anyone know of any resources I can look into?
Sparkfun posted the Eagle files for the weather band breakout, which you could probably send straight off to some PCB shop and have a few boards back pretty quickly.
I cheked already but they don't. It doesn't outright show out of stock but it won't let me add to cart, I contacted support and they told me they don't have it right now.
Yeah, seems like it'll be the way to go whenever I can get hold of that chip. It's really surprising there are not any competing products or alternatives that I can find.
Few people these days know that services such as weather radio exist, and most hobbyists seem to assume that to do anything useful requires access to the internet.
Marine radios sold in North America tune in the weather bands, as isolated coastal areas are where weather forecasts are really useful and often, hard to get by other means.
Oooh, those look nice. If I can't find the chip I may try hacking those to my needs.
My use case is actually different. In Mexico City the earthquake detection alerts actually are transmitted through that frequency and then an alert is played through speakers on the streets. It's used mainly because of the speed advantages, apparently radio waves travel faster than the seismic waves and depending on where the epicenter was the alarm can reach you a full 2 minutes before you feel it.
Today there was a national drill and I noticed that if I wear headphones while working at my computer I don't notice the alarm at all. One alternative would be a phone app, but I've had mixed results with alerts from that, plus there's a delay on the alerts. Another one would be getting an alarm for my house but believe it or not there is like a weird monopoly for NOAA frequency receivers in Mexico and they are really expensive (the ones you linked I can apparently import, hopefully one of them works).
I figured I could have an arduino react to the frequency alert (since trying to solve this through a web API would actually be slower), have it control the lights at my office and have a speaker play a custom sound (I was thinking of playing a less stress inducing one instead of the one the government uses XD)
Sounds like a cool application, and I imagine the boards in those inexpensive survival radios would be easy to hack.
Looking through Amazon I realized I was wrong: the survivalists all know about the weather band! There are hundreds of survival radio offerings that receive the weather broadcasts. And presumably, in Mexico, the earthquake warnings.
