WEATHER RADIO PROGRAMMING

We highly recommend that every household includes a NOAA Weather Radio, and recommend that you DO NOT rely on outdoor warning sirens. Outdoor warning sirens are only intended to notify people when they are outside, and are prone to failure. Additionally, the majority of Marion County is not covered by outdoor warning sirens. For information on where to buy a weather radio, see the following link: https://www.weather.gov/nwr/nwr_receivers#residential. To find out how to program a weather radio for Marion County, see below:

 

Marion County is served by the Winfield NOAA Weather Radio transmitter as shown in the picture above. At the very least, your weather radio needs to be set to the correct frequency. The frequency for the Winfield transmitter is 162.525 MHz.

 

As long as you have the correct frequency set, you will get alerts for Marion County; however you will also get alerts for all counties covered by the transmitter, as shown in the first picture. In order to get alerts specifically for Marion County, you will need to program the Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) code for Marion County in your radio. Many weather radios will let you select counties by name, however some models may require you to enter the SAME code manually. The SAME code for Marion County is 001093.

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After the frequency and SAME code are set, your weather radio should be able to receive alerts for our county, without alerting for other areas. These instructions apply to all areas and Cities in Marion County.

For more detailed instructions on programming specific models of weather radios, see the following link from NWS Mobile:

https://www.weather.gov/mob/nwrhelp