I am looking for a wrist watch with a loud enough alarm to wake me up in the mornings. My hearing still tests fine, so that is not the issue. I do take the watch off at night and lay it on the tent floor close by; obviously I'm not going to hear anything when the watch is down in the sleeping bag! My results, so far, are the following:

Timex--can't even hear the alarm when I'm wide awake unless I put the watch right against my ear.

Casio (men's)--I can hear it when awake, but about 2/3 of the time it won't wake me up in the morning. If I put it in my cooking pot to produce an echo, it wakes me up about 50% of the time.

High Gear Axio (with altimeter and thermometer)--the alarm is even fainter than Timex's, so that feature is completely useless. This watch is a good deal at Campmor if you don't care when you get up!

I really don't want to haul the weight of a loud travel alarm unless I absolutely have to! There are some days when I need to get on the trail early, and those are invariably the days that the watch doesn't wake me up!

I have a casio mens, and like you I wish it was louder. I've never found anything good and loud. if you find something good I want to know..

I have ended up often taking my iphone along as an ebook reader, which compares well in weight to a paperback - the alarm on it is loud as heck, so it *does* wake me up.

Nike used to sell an alarm watch that had a sort of resonant chamber integrated into the bezel (IIUC). Since it was Nike I'm sure they discontinued them, but maybe some are rattling around the internets somewhere. Here's a sample.

Wake me, dangit.

Me, I've never found an alarm watch that can stir me.

I've had many a wristwatch over the years but never had one that I could depend on to wake me up. Maybe if I taped it to my ear......

I'm with phat except my phone is an HTC Droid Incredible. It's an electronic Swiss Army Knife and the alarm is VERY loud.

The phone is my book reader, map, movie viewer, mp3 player, GPS, camera, backup flashlight, alarm clock, compass, star chart, and it even makes phone calls once in a while. With the extended capacity battery in airplane mode it goes a long, long time and even longer with a solar charger. But I digress.....maybe I could wear it on my wrist and call it a phone-watch?

I don't take a phone. Most of the places I backpack, there's rarely reception, often not even at the trailhead. The one time I tried using my phone as an alarm (car-camping in Yosemite), the battery was dead before morning because the phone was using max power all night trying to connect.

It looks as though I'll have to look for a really lightweight travel alarm!

I don't take it for the phone - heck *none* of the places I backpack have reception. I take it because I have the app on it to read amazon kindle books - an Ipod touch (the same thing as my iphone without the phone) would do the same thing. When on the trail I leave it in "airplane" mode so it doesn't try to be a phone anyway. that way I can read lots without it running out of batteries.

So for me, it's lighter than a paperback book, holds lots of books, and also manages to be an alarm clock - that's good enough dual use for me to forget it was ever a phone until I'm back in "civilization" and take it out of airplane mode.

To me a phone is a phone, and I don't want to use it for anything else. I'm something of a luddite, especially out on the trail!

Find an Ipod touch - then you have the same thing as I have and it's not technically a phone

I know at least with a Nokia you can set the alarm and then turn the phone off and it will turn on when the alarm goes off. I used to use it a lot for travel. The screen is what burns battery and this avoids that problem.

I see my phone as a multi-use tool that also happens to make phone calls.

Sorry, I'm not going to haul along a gadget that will take me a year to learn how to use and will require me to pack an instruction book! One of the reasons I go backpacking is to get away from that sort of thing! I certainly can't read books on a tiny screen (my DIL has an iPhone and there's absolutely no way I could use most of the apps). I don't even read books on my home computer screen (gives me a headache). I do very little reading on backpacking trips anyway.

Normally I don't worry about getting up early. However, there are occasions in which I need to start at the crack of dawn--during hot spells when I need to get my dog Hysson off the trail and in deep shade by noon, and in the Rockies to get across exposed areas before the afternoon thunderstorms hit.

I'll look for that Nike watch (yes, it has been discontinued) and also for lightweight travel alarms (I'll take my scale with me!). My past experience with travel alarms is that they are quite fragile, but that was 10 years ago.

Some lightweight AM/FM radios have an alarm feature (quite loud) and they are no bigger/heavier than some travel alarms.

I've had a Nike watch which was quite loud.
The trick I use when sleeping in tent (other places too...) is to hang the watch from any possible thing, to have it a few cm above my head. I add small pieces of webbing to the tent or tarp to hang stuff from, lamp and watch for instance, to be stategically positioned.

OM-

As I get older, I can't hear most alarm watches. My wife tells me when they are beeping!

BUT- I have had excellent results with my Suunto Core watch/altimeter/etc. I put the watch in my shoe near my head when I sleep, it has always managed to wake me up. It is easy to set the alarm. The watch is rather large, but it is a watch and not something else. It is the only watch of many watches I have that will actually wake me!

REI has them, so you can try it out and if it doesn't work, they have an excellent return policy.

Don

I've had exactly the same issues with watches -- even when I think they are loud enough when I purchase them, I may not hear them on the trail, whether because of location/orientation issues or because I'm sleeping more soundly.

(Normally on trail, I don't need or want an alarm -- it's one of those things I'm getting away from on the trail. However, it can be critical sometimes, for example if I'm hiking the Grand Canyon and need to be someplace while it's still in shade or to catch a shuttle or some such thing.)

Anyway, what I have used is a small, cheap "travel alarm" from K-Mart -- maybe 1"x 3/8" x 2.5" and weighs a couple of ounces. Battery in it lasts for years. Also has a large, legible LC display with a backlight if you press a button. It's small enough to be appropriate for those of us oriented to LW backpacking but not so small as to vanish into the pack -- never to be seen until unpacking at the end of the trip.

I need to get another one, now, but last time I got one it was well under $10.

My last camera was an Olympus Stylus 720 and it had an alarm feature built in. It was fairly loud. The camera died last December and I replaced it with a Fuji FinePix. I haven't yet checked to see if it, too, has an alarm.

You may want to poke around some of the more obscure menus, if you own a digital camera. You may already have an alarm clock you don't know you have.

Did it have to be left on all night in order for the alarm to go off?

No need to keep the camera "turned on" to have the alarm. I presume it ran off the same circuit as the internal time clock. The shut off for when the alarm sounded was the shutter release button. I rarely used it, but it worked well when I did.

DARN!!! my 725 olympus *HAS* an alarm.. and it's not bad..

Of course, I never looked for it..

Now I feel really stupid...

Seiko made several BellMatic watches years ago, still show up on ebay all the time.

It has a tiny hammer and a real gong that it bangs on inside the watch case. Easy to set, just turn the bezel to the hour... you can hear how loud it is on Youtube....

Since this is a somewhat old thread resurrected, apologies for if this is redundant but I didn't read all the past comments ...

Just want to say that when I swapped to a cheap replacement watch on trail this year, what ultimately worked for me was an alarm app on my cell phone. Plenty loud, and much nicer to wake up to as it started very quietly and just gradually became louder. Only downside is that I couldn't completely turn my cell phone off (completely power down) of course, which doubtless resulted in a small power loss overnight, but it didn't seem like much of a hit.