[NN5I]

Of course. The WX radio is a source of information, not a guide to behavior. It's like the GPS, as in your excellent simile. Still, it interrupted me when I wasn't seeking its information, and for that I banished it to the landfill.

I intended to use a WX radio to get forecasts, but I got tired of waiting through 15 minutes or more of -- for example -- tide predictions, expected wave heights, and so forth, none of which was relevant, say, to my hopes for good shooting weather to go to the range.

The WX radio serves, generally, much too large an area to serve me well. But for some people it's a useful and even essential tool. ARES/RACES/Skywarn enthusiasts, for example. Note that I didn't say it was useless or that others shouldn't want one -- only that I didn't want one. Still don't.

Perhaps I'm a bit inconsistent, though. I use a GPS often -- nearly always, when on a trip -- and have been led astray on rare occasion, such as to an expressway in Mississippi that hadn't been built yet. But, being the suspicious, untrusting old curmudgeon I am, I didn't get into trouble.

I'm glad it saved the folks in Ohio -- but I have known lots more people who have been hit by lightning (one) than caught in a tornado (zero), even though many (about ten) of my loved ones live in Moore, OK and don't have WX radios. Tornado deaths, lightning injuries, and the like, are exceedingly rare events demographically. Many more people are killed in airliners than in tornadoes, but that's a very remote possibility anyhow. Going to Europe in an airliner is much safer than going to the supermarket in a Classic Thunderbird. My first Judo coach was hit by lightning on his back porch. Some thought it made him a bit punchy, but those of us who knew him well knew that ol' Coach was always punchy. He'd been a semipro boxer in his youth.

When someone invents a device that'll tell me when some teenager, showing off, is about to smack my little pickup with his own little pickup, I'll buy. That's a much less remote hazard.