Radio & the Invisible Spectrum: SDR, Mesh & RFadvanced · ~240 min

The Weather Radio That Only Wakes You For Your Own County — Decode and Route NOAA SAME Alerts Yourself

A store-bought weather radio has one setting that matters and one blind spot that nobody mentions. The setting is county filtering, and it is genuinely good. The blind spot is that the radio cannot tell you when it has stopped working. A dead battery, a knocked-over antenna, a transmitter off the air for maintenance — all three produce the same experience as a quiet week, which is silence. So the question underneath this project is not 'how do I decode radio data?

' It is: how would you *know* that your alerting system is still listening? That question is the difference between owning an alarm and owning a monitored alarm, and answering it properly happens to require you to build the decoder, the router, the log, and the watchdog — in that order.

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What you'll do

A receive-only alert router running as a service on your own machine that Claude Code built — an RTL-SDR dongle feeding rtl_fm into the open-source samedec decoder, which spawns a Python handler you wrote for every SAME message it hears — that reads the digital header NOAA Weather Radio sends ahead of every alert, decides whether that alert actually covers one of YOUR six-digit county codes, routes it into one of three severity tiers you defined (loud, quiet push, log only), refuses to ever suppress a national activation or an unrecognised event code, archives the spoken audio of every alert alongside a searchable SQLite history, renders it all as one self-contained offline HTML page, and — the part no consumer weather radio does — runs a separate watchdog that shouts at you when it has heard nothing at all for longer than the weekly test interval, because silence from a broken receiver and silence from a calm week look exactly the same.