Using All-Hazards, Limiting Alerts to Your County

Using All-Hazards

Your BC370CRS’s All-Hazards function makes it one of the most powerful weather radio receivers built. It will activate on local broadcast of the standard EAS signal on NOAA (weather) channels, AM, FM, or TV Broadcast channels. Your scanner automatically monitors for an EAS alert on the last-tuned channel whenever you turn off the scanner.

To ensure that you are alerted, be sure to set the MODE switch to Weather (if you receive alerts on standard NOAA channels), or to AM/FM and tune to the appropriate broadcast channel in your area.

Limiting Alerts to Your County

Alerts include a special digital signal called S.A.M.E. (specific area message encoding) that identifies the area impacted by an alert. This lets you set the scanner to ignore alerts that are not for your county, preventing many false alerts for storms that are in surrounding counties.

You can store up to 4 county codes in your scanner and select one or more of them to receive alerts for.

Programming County Codes

Your scanner uses FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) codes to identify counties. You can find the FIPS code for your area by going to:

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/nwrsame.htm

and looking up your county’s 6-digit code. Once you have the codes for the counties you are interested in, follow these steps to program them into the scanner.

1.Slide the MODE switch to Weather.

2.Press and hold the soft key for the FIPS position you want to program. After about 2 seconds, the display changes to show the current setting.

3.Use the keypad to enter the code for that position, then press E/PGM.

4.Tap the other FIPS keys and use the keypad to enter the codes you want to associate with each key.

5.When you have programmed all FIPS codes, press the RTN soft key to return to normal weather mode.