The familiar weather radios have changed their name to: "ALL HAZARDS RADIO." This is because they broadcast both weather and non-weather emergency messages. And, they are now programmable to sound an alarm when a specific event at a specific location is occurring. Thus you could program your radio to sound the alarm only for Tornado warnings affecting only your county. This technology is called Specific Area Message Encoding ("SAME")

The programming is done by selecting the desired weather/non-weather events and your county FIPS code. The FIPS codes are six digit numbers (055123) defining the section of a county, the state, and the county name. Some county and marine locations are further sub-divided into smaller sections when the first digit varies between 1 and 9.