The 5 Best Emergency Weather Radio

Top pick

The Midland ER310 is the best emergency weather radio for most people because it has all the charging options you need, as well as a powerful flashlight, excellent reception, and a loud, clear speaker for radio and weather alerts. It’s also more durable against water and drops, and it’s more convenient and comfortable to carry, than most other emergency radios we tested. Plus, the hand-cranked battery generator actually worked as advertised (a frustratingly rare feat for weather radios).

It just works. The ER310 is loud and easy to hear whether you’re listening to music at your campsite or getting the latest NOAA report. Registering 92 decibels on our iPhone sound-meter app, the ER310 was one of the louder radios we tested. Music was a little muddled on the FM stations, especially at maximum volume, but the radio sounded fine when we were just listening to human voices, such as talk radio or the NOAA weather band. The ER310 also comes with a headphone jack—a surprisingly inconsistent feature among the weather radios we liked, but one that can certainly come in handy.

In our tests, the pivoting antenna on the ER310 made it easy for us to home in on radio signals everywhere, from a basement in Boston to the middle of the woods in Tompkins County, New York (although we did encounter some sparse patches in the Catskills). We also like that the antenna folds out of the way when not in use, so you can easily read the LCD screen, crank the battery, use the flashlight, or collect solar power. The large rubber buttons are easy to find and press, even in the dark; at the same time, they’re recessed enough that you’re not likely to trigger them accidentally as the radio bounces around in your go bag.

The alerts work, too. If there’s a weather alert in your area, the ER310’s built-in NOAA audible alarm and flashing display will make sure you notice. When the siren sounds and the lights begin blaring—it can be quite clamorous—you can press any button to switch the radio to your preferred (preprogrammed) NOAA weather channel to get the news. If you fail to turn on the radio before a minute goes by, the weather memory indicator flashes every five seconds to let you know that an alert has been issued, and it continues to do so until you press any button to turn the notice off. So if you have hearing loss, or if you’re out of the house when the alarm goes off, you can still find out if some ugly conditions are headed your way.

In our initial tests, the Midland ER310’s alert easily overpowered that of every other radio. Even when we placed the models outside, the ER310 made it painfully clear that there was some kind of emergency. Most of the other radios’ alerts—even on the desktop models—just sounded like distant, unplaceable beeping. At one point after the initial testing, I neglected to turn off the weather alert feature and was greeted by a real-life tornado warning from the ER310 while I was on the phone with my insurance company. It’s loud—and if you don’t believe me, you can ask Tara in customer service.

It includes a decent flashlight and some emergency beacons. The Midland ER310 comes with a large, easy-to-read backlit LCD screen, and the built-in flashlight produces an impressive 25 foot-candles of light output on its highest setting—it’s two to three times more powerful than the flashlights on almost all the other models we tested, except those of the Midland ER210 and the RunningSnail MD-090P, which were slightly brighter. The flashlight also has a dimmer beam option and an SOS blinking pattern, both of which can come in handy for casual camping or wilderness survival. The radio also has a button that sets off a high-pitched tone—beyond the range of human hearing—to attract the attention of rescue dogs when you’re really in distress. We’re not exactly sure how well it works, but our neighbor’s dog definitely got mad at something.

Its battery lasts, can recharge in an outage, and can be a charger. The ER310 has all the power and charging options we look for, and it lasts three times longer than its smaller cousin, the ER210. It operates on a replaceable, rechargeable 2,600 mAh lithium-ion battery pack that you can juice up via the built-in hand crank, the top-mounted solar panels, or the radio’s Micro-USB port. The solar panels charge the radio automatically as long as it’s in sunlight. They also function even when it’s totally dead—in our tests, as soon as the ER310 shut off, it began to charge itself again.

The ER310 was also one of the few models we tested that actually delivered on the advertised power of their crank charge: One minute of cranking on the ER310 provided about 10 minutes of radio or a few minutes of flashlight time. In a battery-sipping standby mode, it can receive advance weather alerts as they come through. Without the weather alerts turned on, we were surprised to find that the radio’s clock kept running in this low-battery mode for more than three years without a charge.

It’s durable. The ER310 emerged unscathed from both our drop tests and our water-resilience tests, with a few barely noticeable scratches to show for it. Although all of our picks survived similarly well, some models—such as the Retekess HR11W and our previous budget pick, the Epica Emergency Radio—either short-circuited or left behind pieces of shattered plastic on the sidewalk (or both). We’ve been using the ER310 since 2017, so we’re confident that it’s one of the sturdiest models available. It has a one year limited warranty, and is also one of the easier models to fix yourself, should the need arise: When we opened up the ER310 and examined the electronics, we were impressed with the organized wiring, which included multiple plastic connections designed to make it easier to disassemble for the replacement of any broken parts.

By contrast, on the smaller ER210, we found that Midland had apparently taken some shortcuts, with sloppy soldering that couldn’t always handle our dissection.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Although the radio on the ER310 is certainly audible and loud, it’s not exactly good. The sound quality is fine for weather alerts and talk radio, but if you’re looking for a weather radio that will also let you enjoy music on the porch, you’re better off with our upgrade pick, the Eton Sidekick.

A minute of cranking on the ER310 gets you only about a third as much radio play or flashlight power as an equivalent amount of cranking produces on the smaller ER210. That said, such results are exactly as advertised and either equivalent or superior to what we got from cranking almost every other model we tested (all of which drastically overpromised with regard to their prowess in hand-generated power).