For more than 30 years, ERRTS (Event Reporting Radio Telemetry System), commonly known as ALERT (Automated Local Evaluation in Real Time), has provided a ubiquitous real-time monitoring standard radio protocol for hydrologic data transmissions. ALERT has proved invaluable but has limitations; especially during extreme events. ALERT2(™), the next generation protocol for weather data transmission, has been designed to solve these reliability issues. We present the results of the first deployment in Australia​ ​of existing ALERT gauging sites leveraging end-to-end the ALERT2 protocol, with quantitative comparisons of ALERT and ALERT2 transmission performance.