Home > Consumer Reviews > JENSEN SRWS1000 AM/FM Weather Radio with Marine Forecast

This radio works well enough, although setup for alerts is very poorly explained in the manual.

But it has a strangely poor design for a unit designed for emergencies. If you power it from AC, and count on the internal batteries for backup, you're looking for trouble. If there's a power failure, the internal batteries will NOT take over operation of the radio. (You have to physically unplug the external power to use batteries.)

Worse, when power returns, the radio will stay in Power Off mode, so it will not be alerting anything, and you will not be any the wiser. When you notice, and power it back on, you'll also have to reset the county code, or you'll get ALL alerts. (You don't have to reprogram the code memories, but you have to choose which one you want.

For a radio designed for use in emergency weather conditions, this sort of bad behavior during a power failure should earn it an "Unacceptable" rating.

If you're not relying on it for emergency alerts, you might live with this flaw.

This AM/FM/NOAA Weather/SAME radio is an excellent value when compared to other functionally similar products for the price. It's a swiss army-type radio that provides capabilities (example: small flashlight) that you would need in a really serious emergency. It uses four "C" size batteries that will last way longer than "AA" size. I urge people NOT to use an "AA" battery adapter, because that defeats the whole entire purpose of having "C" size batteries that give much longer life. It does not come with an AC/DC 12V adapter (that's the 1-star reduction), but that is no big deal because you can buy a universal 12V adapter for about $15 that comes with different jack sizes having switchable polarity, one of which will probably fit the Jensen radio. Don't even install the "C" batteries until you are headed to the storm cellar, AND carry a total of EIGHT "C" cells with you just in case of prolonged isolation. These are just my opinions.

I've only had this radio for a couple of days but so far it has been great. It picks up the NOAA weather information just fine and that's what I bought it for.

Set up took a few minutes but not too bad using the county codes from the online NOAA website. I like the ability to set multiple county codes. I also like the regular AM/FM ability. The ability to set up an alert from NOAA and still be able to listen to a regular radio station is definitely a plus as is the silent warning feature. All in all it does just what I wanted it to do.

The radio was designed several years back so even though the existing flashlight feature is a plus. if there is ever an engineering update a switch to an LED flashlight should be made.

I'm very pleased with the radio. The buttons give good control of its many functions and the display is easy to read. I hadn't realized that it required C batteries, but found that AA batteries with C sized adapters have run it very well for two months now. Presumably running the light and the siren might eat up those smaller batteries pretty quickly, but this radio provides news and weather in the bedroom, not a lifeboat. A little on the pricy side, but a good performer.

I don't know what problem the previous reviewer had, but I have two of these and they work great. The only real problem is the manual. The radio will work provided you have the correct settings for receiving alerts. The manual does a poor job of explaining how to get it to do the alerts.

The other critique is the lack of an AC power supply.