Edit: having continued reading more comments and googling what the fuck a “weather radio” is… I’m now deeply annoyed at the fact I have no equivalent living in Australia. I could look at a global weather service like Navtex but I’m actually not interested in the weather, i just want a way to get emergency broadcast warnings without relying on my phone. The system in Australia doesn’t use cell broadcast it uses a shitty alternative, they are tendering for a replacement that does use cell broadcast but who knows when that will actually be running. Since I have zero trust in the current system I’d like a way to get critical emergency notices without having to develop a habit of paranoid checking emergency websites or building my own fragile alert system using their RSS feeds or something like that.

It comes with the side effect of being a decent SDR for tuning into all sorts of things not just your local TV stations :-)

Also get a cheap battery operated radio and a stock of batteries for it. Batteries don't last forever in storage, so replace them every now and then (check the expiry date on the pack) and don't leave the batteries in the radio but next to it (saves them leaking over the contacts, last thing you want to do when you NEED the radio is having to take it apart to clean the battery contacts or hunting for the batteries that fit it).

EDIT: Also something to put on your list, A decent flashlight. Your phone is great, but if you have a power outage then you will want to kepe that charge for actual phone calls.

USB broadcast tuners can be repurposed as software-defined radios? That sounds like a few Amazon and GitHub links I’d be very curious to see!

But most of the cheap ones ($20 and less) are just DTV receivers that happen to be able to provide a signal that SDR tools can utilize.

More information about this: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

Buy a $15 DTV tuner and antenna and hook them up to a monitor. You're being blasted with free HDTV over the air.

It was somewhat rhetorical, as I have access to weather alerts via the internet and am not in an area vulnerable to tornados or earthquakes.