California fires: smart speakers and emergency alerts

Thu Jul 26 17:32:16 UTC 2018

Once upon a time, valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu> said:
> Do those use a frequency band that's suitable for cellphones to monitor (antenna
> size, power, etc)? Because your best chance of getting my attention in an emergency
> is to make my phone start shrieking.

NOAA Weather Radio frequencies are in the 162 MHz band.  I have no idea
how well a cell-phone could pick that up, but even if they could, it's
going to be a power draw.  Also, there are 7 different channels, and the
phone would have to know which channel to tune for the local area.

For phones, it is much more practical to use the (already provided)
notifications from the cell network (which you can mostly opt out of as
well).

-- 
Chris Adams <cma at cmadams.net>