ACU-RITE 8550 is a Weather Alert Radio that will receive encoded civil and weather emergency alert messages from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio broadcast towers. These broadcast stations are located all over the United States. NOAA operates more than 1000 towers throughout the 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and in the U.S. Pacific Territories. This weather alert radio uses Specific Area Message Encoding (S.A.M.E) to identify specific areas, like a county or localized area of a state. This technology limits the occurrence of “false alarms”, that is, alert messages that do not apply to your area.