[Jeffhs]

SixCats!,

The MW button on your DX390 will bring in the AM broadcast band. LW is longwave, 150-400 kHz; it was used for such things as aircraft navigation beacons and weather forecasts years ago (long before today's NOAA weather radio and SAME [specific area message encoding] all-hazard receivers), but now is largely unused. MW stands for mediumwave, another name for AM broadcast.

I don't know why you cannot seem to get anything on AM with that radio. I belong to a local radio club whose former president has a DX-390; his works great, even using a makeshift antenna in an apartment building. Even if you live out in the country, miles away from the nearest AM station, you should be able to hear something on the AM band. I would say your radio's antenna was shielded by all the metal in your car, if you were trying to test the receiver inside the vehicle. I'd try the radio outside the car, away from any metal if possible.

The DX-390 is not an emergency-alert radio, as another poster here has stated. It will receive standard FM, but not the NOAA weather band at 162 MHz (seven channels, with 162.55 MHz being the most popular). If you want a radio that will alert you to approaching storms and other emergencies, there are many makes of receivers built just for this purpose. Midland Electronics of Kansas City, Missouri has a line of these receivers, and they are excellent. I have a Midland 74-210 all-hazard radio which I purchased some five years ago, and believe me, it's been worth every cent of what I paid for it. The weather alert tone drives me nuts sometimes when it goes off several times in one day, as it has the last few days because of flood warnings for a local river, but this is a small price to pay for the information the radio gives me when the signal does sound.

You can get NOAA weather receivers at any department store these days. Today's all-hazard receivers are programmed to alert users to most hazards, including security risks and Amber alerts. All modern NOAA all-hazard receivers are equipped with a feature that will alow you to set the unit to respond to weather warnings for only one specific area, for example the county in which you live. The radio will ignore warnings for all other areas, if programmed correctly.